SubscribeAugust 15th, 2011
gads, this is terrifying
A Christian Plot for Domination?
Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry aren’t just devout—both have deep ties to a fringe fundamentalist movement known as Dominionism, which says Christians should rule the world.
With Tim Pawlenty out of the presidential race, it is now fairly clear that the GOP candidate will either be Mitt Romney or someone who makes George W. Bush look like Tom Paine. Of the three most plausible candidates for the Republican nomination, two are deeply associated with a theocratic strain of Christian fundamentalism known as Dominionism. If you want to understand Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry, understanding Dominionism isn’t optional.
Put simply, Dominionism means that Christians have a God-given right to rule all earthly institutions. Originating among some of America’s most radical theocrats, it’s long had an influence on religious-right education and political organizing. But because it seems so outré, getting ordinary people to take it seriously can be difficult. Most writers, myself included, who explore it have been called paranoid. In a contemptuous 2006 First Things review of several books, including Kevin Phillips’ American Theocracy, and my own Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, conservative columnist Ross Douthat wrote, “the fear of theocracy has become a defining panic of the Bush era.”
Now, however, we have the most theocratic Republican field in American history, and suddenly, the concept of Dominionism is reaching mainstream audiences. Writing about Bachmann in The New Yorker this month, Ryan Lizza spent several paragraphs explaining how the premise fit into the Minnesota congresswoman’s intellectual and theological development. And a recent Texas Observer cover story on Rick Perry examined his relationship with the New Apostolic Reformation, a Dominionist variant of Pentecostalism that coalesced about a decade ago. “[W]hat makes the New Apostolic Reformation movement so potent is its growing fascination with infiltrating politics and government,” wrote Forrest Wilder. Its members “believe Christians—certain Christians—are destined to not just take ‘dominion’ over government, but stealthily climb to the commanding heights of what they term the ‘Seven Mountains’ of society, including the media and the arts and entertainment world.”
Imagine a modern society in which Exodus 22:18 is taken literally. Do you think Perry and Bachmann are already planning burning days? Do you think they’ll use the ashes for fertilizer in the reconstructed Garden of Eden? Will those who survive be required to make Hajj to its gates yearly?
August 11th, 2011
mean and venal people, can they be vaccinated against?
Two things came to my attention today that got crazy-glued in my head and I thought I’d share.
The first is a clip is a short little video sent to me from someone at My Fellow American and the second from the Rachel Maddow show, a segment about Rick Perry and his prayer convention dominion buddies.
My only comment about this one about American people who happen to be Muslim is that I hope it isn’t too subtle. The nasty voice over is obnoxious, strident and horrifyingly familiar (reminiscent of Rick Perry or Michelle Bachmann or …). The juxtaposition of the voice over with the images of Muslim Americans as firefighters, nurses, teachers, etc is good but I do wonder how many times that will be missed. I mean if a person can’t read a birth certificate accurately then what makes you think this isn’t going to fly right over his or her head?
This next one – watch at 5:09 to 5:26.
Rick Perry listens to this Wagner dude; it appears as if he’s one of Perry’s soldiers in his Army of God. We want his paranoia and literalism influencing national politics? I bet he watches that show Supernatural and believes in its literal truth. It’s actually kind of funny.
Here’s what C. Peter Wagner says: “And that’s an invitation for the sun goddess to continue to demonize the whole nation. Since the night that the present emperor slept with the sun goddess the stock market in Japan has gone down. Never come up since.”
Yep. For real.
What links these things in my head? Well religion I suppose. Wagner hates Catholics, Muslims, people who offer Shinto prayers I guess. I expect he hates lots of people. He and the voice on the myfellowamerican video are metaphorically identical. It is this that the world is really fighting. I really do think that Wagner’s organization, The New Apostolic Reformation, is, if a person, as mad as a hatter – a hatter that wants its forefinger on the thermo-nuclear-all-out-bring-on-the-apocalypse button.
In some ways the Republican/tea party mindset that has become so public is a good thing. I expect that in America’s heart (and not only in America‘s heart), these people with little empathy, a lot of fear, and a horrendously non-empirical “knowledge” base, have always been there in more numbers than most of us care to admit to, even to ourselves. The apparent rise of the crazies has multiple causes of course, but I suspect this is a rise in visibility and not really a rise in real numbers. If we survive people like these ones who make up The New Apostolic Reformation then either we do something to minimize their threat, or we will face this again at some point in our future. Like mold, bacteria or the Great Awakenings, they die back and resurge if just left alone. We need a vaccination.
August 9th, 2011
more on Charles Taylor / the golden past
So I did run out and pick up a copy of Charles Taylor’s Malaise of Modernity from the library. I’m reading it now but I just wanted to share with you a single paragraph from the book and my response to it.
He’s been outlining the modern sources of worry. The first is individualism. He says that “people used to see themselves as part of a larger order. In some cases, this was a cosmic order, a “great chain of Being,” in which humans figured in their proper place along with angels, heavenly bodies, and our fellow earthly creatures.” This sense of being has been replaced by a sense of individual freedom “to be ourselves.” The “worry” part is related to a Taylor’s sense of loss of purpose that goes along with the loss of our place in the chain of Being. (My worry would have been around the definition of “our proper place.”)
The second issue is the “primacy of instrumental reason.” Here is the paragraph in question:
No doubt sweeping away the old orders has immensely widened the scope of instrumental reason. Once society no longer has a sacred structure, once social arrangements and modes of action are no longer grounded in the order of things or the will of God, they are in a sense up for grabs. They can be redesigned with their consequences for the happiness and wellbeing of individuals as our goal. The yardstick that henceforth applies is that of instrumental reason. Similarly, once the creatures that surround us lose the significance that accrued to their place in the chain of being, they are open to being treated as raw materials or instruments for our projects.
There is just so much wrong with this but really all of it stems from the golden-age fallacy. That last sentence, for example. The laws surrounding the protection of animals are present in this instrumental modernity. In Taylor’s golden past they didn’t exist; bear baiting was considered a fun entertainment. How many morally based vegetarians existed in Taylor’s golden West? How many today in this instrumental world? Come on dude.
This secular rise Taylor is so worried about goes along with the rise in things like social safety nets. Public education, public health clinics, childhood inoculations, unemployment programs, welfare provisions: just look at what used to happen to unwed mothers in Catholic countries if you want an education in how well this “order of things” functioned for those on its margins. And those human things like guilt, shame and desperation that kept the order intact? And slavery—enabled in some places because that order of things decided that those people of a different color had no souls (like other animals) and so could be treated as owned objects. I would have thought this the very definition of instrumental reason and so I think there is great doubt about the rise of instrumental reason in modernity.
Anyway, if the whole thesis of Taylor’s malaise is going to be based on this faulty assumption then his argument is going to drown in the Slough of Ridiculous.
July 29th, 2011
evidence of a Christian American?
“Due to the inability of the Congress to work together, the good of the people across the globe are being compromised by the self interest of our political leaders,” said Rev. Dr. J. Herbert Nelson, Director of Public Witness, Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). “Too many Congresspersons of all parties are trapped in a space where commitment to the common good is diminished for the sake of personal gain and the seduction of power. In this process, the American people and others all over the world are left to suffer. Faith leaders cannot stand idly by and watch while the mandate of the gospel to love our neighbors is violated in the halls of Congress.”
Heh! Listen up you dudes spouting Christian values in the US Congress. Mean any of it?
via Eideard
“Faith” is a fine invention
For Gentlemen who see!
But Microscopes are prudent
In an Emergency! (E. Dickinson)
The society that resulted from the European invasion of the Americas seems prone to periods of alternating despair and certainty. The periods of certainty result in territorial and cultural expansion; despair results in upsurges of religiosity and (mental and social) isolationism. The first comes with that awful taste of American-style surety of superiority, that rather hubristic idea that we are the vanguard of human civilization. The second comes when that state crashes – as it inevitably does – against the facts, and falls like a mirror shattered in rage and fear.
My question is how to navigate a society that refuses an even keel?
I was brought to this query by an article on the Daily Beast about religious and anti-religious films written by Marlow Stern.
From superchurch satire ‘Salvation Boulevard’ to the atheist film ‘The Ledge’ and Sundance fave ‘Higher Ground,’ an abnormal number of movies this summer rail against evangelicalism. Marlow Stern speaks with filmmakers and experts from both sides of the debate, including Vera Farmiga of ‘Higher Ground’ and Kirk Cameron of ‘Fireproof.’
Wrestling with it, I found myself thinking about the cycles of religious evangelicism in the US often talked about as the Great Awakenings. (If you’re interested in the topic you might try Jon Butler’s Awash in a Sea of Faith.) It also led me to think about Emily Dickinson and her experience of her community’s salvation.
There is a rather fine short article about E.D. and the complex nature of her faith.
In Dickinson’s teen years, a wave of religious revivals moved through New England. One by one, her friends and family members made the public profession of belief in Christ that was necessary to become a full member of the church. Although she agonized over her relationship to God, Dickinson ultimately did not join the church–not out of defiance but in order to remain true to herself: “I feel that the world holds a predominant place in my affections. I do not feel that I could give up all for Christ, were I called to die” (L13). By the time the First Congregational Church moved to a site near the Homestead on Main Street in 1868, Emily Dickinson had stopped attending services altogether.
Dickinson’s attitude toward spiritual matters was more complex than her poem “Some keep the Sabbath going to church / I keep it staying at home” (Fr236) implies. While her poems are saturated with the language, ritual, and expectation of traditional religious experience, her tone varies tremendously. Some poems affirm the need for faith: “Faith – is the Pierless Bridge / Supporting what We see / Unto the Scene that We do not – ” (Fr978). Irreverence underlies other aspects of her work: “The Bible is an antique Volume – / Written by faded Men / At the suggestion of Holy Spectres -” (Fr1577). At times Dickinson’s poetry expresses outright anger with an absent God:
Of Course – I prayed -
And did God care?
He cared as much as on the Air
A Bird – had stamped her foot -
And cried “Give Me” -
(Fr581)
That’s, I think, the way to handle this current shattered mirror and consequent upswing of despairing faith. The fact that the mirror is broken does not mean what you glimpsed there is no longer true. As best as one can, question, refuse the comfort of simple faith and its feelings of release, refuse the assumptions involved in giving over to the “Gentlemen who see”. Keep formulating alternative responses, but never settle for one; always question, always ask for worldly evidence, for the bird’s perspective on your beliefs.
There’s no way out of the pain of course, no real way to avoid what the mirror reflected. We all have assumptions and we cannot simply leave them all behind, but we can refuse comfort in order to allow questioning. Dickinson remained someone who spoke of gods and the afterlife. That was the basis of her entire world, but her stubborn hold on the world allowed her to remain brilliant, unconventional, a poet.
I mean, who do we remember now? Not those who took hold of the comfort, but those who refused it. There is a reason for that. Not that being remembered is the end-all of desire, but it does point to a lively spot in human awareness, a place where mental sleep has not yet claimed its toll.
This period of upcoming history will be difficult I suspect. No huge wave of desire for comfort, for sleep ever comes without a violent hand for the alarm clocks and a sleeping drug for the awkward pain of living. There will be Emilys of this time, and that voice will be a record of dissent against the coming/ongoing “revival”. I don’t envy her life though, just as I don’t envy Emily’s. So alone, our Amherst Emily must have been with no one who could think as she could, no one who could stand with her in the pain of continual appraisal, constant questioning. So in advance of your life and death, our dearest future unknown Emily, kudos.
In an earlier post I was telling you about the argumentative warning bells that Why God Won’t Go Away set off.
When you come across a passage that unsettles your faith in an author’s veracity or capacity to think past his or her personal biases, one can do two basic things. One can put the book down or one can keep reading, however warily.
I chose the second option because I wanted to get to their information on the neurological position with respect to myth making in humans. Then I hit another of those icky-think places. There were a number but here’s one.
The authors are talking about the Neanderthal people and the finds that have been made where some Neanderthal dead appear to have been buried with grave goods and positioned in such a way as to suggest symbolic thought.
Evidence of Neanderthal mortuary rituals has been discovered at Paleolithic grave sites scattered across Europe and Asia, and while anthropologists know very little about the specifics of Neanderthal myth, these early humans had clearly devised a system of belief that assured them that in some sense, death could be survived.
Jeez Lousie, it so does not. Let’s take this apart just a bit. There is evidence from a number of Neanderthal burials (and other sites) that suggest symbolic thought as well as suggests some intent behind burial that we would describe as ritualistic. But what is true is that we know nothing really of the specifics. In fact, without the assumption that their symbolic system is basically the same as ours, we cannot say anything about what the apparent ritual means. I mean if I make a small pile of stones and a Taliban man makes a similar pile, you think we necessarily did it for the same reason? And the Taliban dude and I are of the same species and same era. Fuck man, what a dumb-shit, patently false set of assumptions and “logical” connections.
It turns out that this book is an extension of The Transmitter to God: The Limbic System, the Soul, and Spirituality by Rhawn Joseph. Here is what a customer had to say about this book.
Joseph’s book contains abundant promise and abundant disappointment. Its bookends–the start and finish–provide provide reasonable interpretations of data from neurological and fossil research. The center, unfortunately, merely affords a bully pulpit for the author’s unsubstantiated rants about religious literature, especially the Koran and the Bible. This juxtaposition of authority and speculation is paralleled by displays of scholarly writing (e.g., citing sources for stated views) at the outset and junior high writing (e.g., missing citations and bizarre interpretations of religious writ) in the middle. Joseph is to be commended for his imagination, but misrepresents his book as a scholarly contribution.
A huh. Yep. Yessiree. You could say the same thing about Why God Won’t Go Away.
Anyway, based on the slim evidence of possible Neanderthal ritual burials and the massive assumption of their cognitive and cultural similarity to us, the authors of Why God say:
The Neanderthals, it seems, had also come to believe that their world was not chaotic, but was instead governed by powerful orderly forces that they could come to know. They believed they could appeal to these forces through proper practices and, to some extent, control them. We know this because Neanderthal shrines have been found in high mountain caves where bear skulls had been ritualistically stacked in pyramids and small crude altars still show the charred evidence of animal sacrifices carried out as long ago as two hundred thousand years.
Can you believe they think of themselves as scientists at all? I know fantasy writers with less vivid imaginations.
Finally, the evidence they cite to support these two paragraphs? Joseph’s The Transmitter to God. That’s like Glen Beck citing The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to prove his impartial stance with regard to Judaism.
So the book goes back to the library unfinished. This is why I pre-read most books before I buy them. I’ll just have to try and find a better source for the information I want.
July 10th, 2011
Mark Twain, Letters from the Earth
I was reminded this morning of Mark Twain’s humor. He’s mean at times, and I absolutely adore it. Have you read The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson? Hilarious, even if a true tragedy with respect to American race ideologies. Twain has a large number of smaller texts (letters and the like) which are usually bypassed in literature departments and local libraries, but thanks to the internet are available as mp3 and digital text. There’s Eve’s Diary, for example. Yes. That Eve. A rather different take on Adam and Eve’s relationship than the one normally promulgated. I mean did you know Eve is responsible for most of the naming?
Then there’s Letters from the Earth which is actually the name of a book of mock letters (fragments, essays, short stories) about religious topics, not released until 1960 some 50 years after Twain’s death. A digital version of the material is made available at Sacred-Texts.com.
In this fine bit of fun there are a set of letters from Satan to his buds Michael and Gabriel. He talks, for example, about man’s pretension to being God’s pet. In addition, apparently the commandments were news to Satan, news which he found a bit hypocritical.
He was ordered into banishment for a day — the celestial day. It was a punishment he was used to, on account of his too flexible tongue. Formerly he had been deported into Space, there being nowhither else to send him, and had flapped tediously around there in the eternal night and the Arctic chill; but now it occurred to him to push on and hunt up the earth and see how the Human-
Race experiment was coming along. By and by he wrote home — very privately — to St. Michael and St. Gabriel about it.
Too flexible tongue! What a nice way of putting it.
Throughout the eleven letters Satan gets more and more appalled at what he sees so that by the time number eleven gets written Satan is a mite ticked at His Father. Still, there is humor. One of my favourite letters in number seven. Here’s the first bit:
Noah and his family were saved — if that could be called an advantage. I throw in the if for the reason that there has never been an intelligent person of the age of sixty who would consent to live his life over again. His or anyone else’s. The Family were saved, yes, but they were not comfortable, for they were full of microbes. Full to the eyebrows; fat with them, obese with them, distended like balloons. It was a disagreeable condition, but it could not be helped, because enough microbes had to be saved to supply the future races of men with desolating diseases, and there were but eight persons on board to serve as hotels for them. The microbes were by far the most important part of the Ark’s cargo, and the part the Creator was most anxious about and most infatuated with. They had to have good nourishment and pleasant accommodations. There were typhoid germs, and cholera germs, and hydrophobia germs, and lockjaw germs, and consumption germs, and black-
plague germs, and some hundreds of other aristocrats, specially precious creations, golden bearers of God’s love to man, blessed gifts of the infatuated Father to his children — all of which had to be sumptuously housed and richly entertained; these were located in the choicest places the interiors of the Family could furnish: in the lungs, in the heart, in the brain, in the kidneys, in the blood, in the guts. In the guts particularly. The great intestine was the favorite resort. There they gathered, by countless billions, and worked, and fed, and squirmed, and sang hymns of praise and thanksgiving; and at night when it was quiet you could hear the soft murmur of it. The large intestine was in effect their heaven. They stuffed it solid; they made it as rigid as a coil of gaspipe. They took pride in this. Their principal hymn made gratified reference to it: Constipation, O Constipation,
The Joyful sound proclaim
Till man’s remotest entrail
Shall praise its Maker’s nameThe discomforts furnished by the Ark were many and various. The family had to live right in the presence of the multitudinous animals, and breathe the distressing stench they make and be deafened day and night with the thunder-
crash of noise their roarings and screechings produced; and in additions to these intolerable discomforts it was a peculiarly trying place for the ladies, for they could look in no direction without seeing some thousands of the creatures engaged in multiplying and replenishing. And then, there were the flies. They swarmed everywhere, and persecuted the Family all day long. They were the first animals up, in the morning, and the last ones down, at night. But they must not be killed, they must not be injured, they were sacred, their origin was divine, they were the special pets of the Creator, his darlings.
July 8th, 2011
warning bells: arguments presented as either/or
I got a copy of Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science & The Biology of Belief from the library. It’s a book written for the general public and so is easy to understand (terminology at a minimum). That’s all good. However…
Before I get to that the book is published by Ballantine Books which is part of Random House. It’s a for-profit business, so some of what comes next may be at their request. The book is targeted to the US market and I suspect the publishers may have wanted material in the text reassuring American religious persons that just because neurology can explain the god experience, this doesn’t mean that god doesn’t exist. Whether the American public actually requires such overtly silly reassurances, is a question I cannot answer.
The problem started when I hit paragraph three on page 9.
A skeptic might suggest that a biological origin to all spiritual longings and experiences, including the universal human yearning to connect with something divine, could be explained as a delusion caused by the chemical misfirings of a bundle of nerve cells.
Ahuh – clang, clang, clang. “Misfirings”? Oh ho, I thought. Read that word choice along with “a skeptic” and the suggestion is that this is a silly thing to believe.
Then the next paragraph:
But the SPECT scans suggested another possibility. The orientation area was working unusually but not improperly, and we believe that we were seeing colorful evidence on the SPECT’s computer screen of the brain’s capacity to make spiritual experience real. After years of scientific study, and careful consideration of our results, Gene and I further believe that we saw evidence of a neurological process that has evolved to allow us humans to transcend material existence and acknowledge and connect with a deeper, more spiritual part of ourselves perceived of as an absolute, universal reality that connects us to all that is.
So either the brain is misfiring or humans can “transcend material existence”?
I nearly gacked. It’s also when I went to the cataloging information in the front of the book and realized that the book was published by a popular press, not necessarily dedicated to decent argument. Either/or arguments should always make you sit up and ask “what the fuck are they trying to shove down my throat.”
“…the brain’s capacity to make spiritual experience real…” What does “real” mean in this context? What if I say, “the brain’s capacity to make dream experiences real”. What if I say, “the brain’s capacity to make sensory experiences real”. Does “real” mean the same thing in both sentences? Are they really saying that there is no difference between the experience of a kicked shin and a dream?
“…after years of scientific study, and careful consideration…” This is the bit that made me feel like gacking. I really hate it when people use scientifically based authority to support something that is essentially narrative. It’s a bit like saying science proves that science isn’t real. If you need science to be “just another narrative” then why use science as the source of legitimacy?
“…evolved to allow us humans to transcend material existence…” Using “evolve” in this sentence does the same thing as “after years of scientific study” in that it suggests a physical basis in reality and that there are evidential reasons for believing in the rest of the sentence. (There aren’t.) They tack on “allow us humans to transcend material existence”. Allow! Allow! Who, exactly is doing the allowing here? Talk about salting the mind. Transcend! Jeez dude. Why don’t you assume what you want to prove.
Breathe, Mary. Just breathe.
The book proceeds by presenting data and interspersing this relevant information with silly analysis. Chapter two, for example, gives you lots of good, simply put, information on the “brain machinery” that enables the various types of awareness and perceptual experiences of which we are capable. Good stuff. Then chapter three (Brain architecture: how the brain makes mind) goes into the various states (hyperarousal and hyperquiescence and the limbic system) – again – good stuff.
But to start chapter three the authors blast argumentative shit out of the book’s universe into ours. It’s horrifying in the extreme.
The idea that our experience of reality—all our experiences, for that matter—are only “secondhand” depictions of what may or may not be objectively real, raises some profound questions about the most basic truths of human existence and the neurological nature of spiritual experience. For example, our experiment with Tibetan meditators and Franciscan nuns showed that the events they considered spiritual were, in fact, associated with observable neurological activity. In a reductionist sense, this could support the argument that religious experience is only imagined neurologically, that God is physically “all in your mind.” But a full understanding of the way in which the brain and mind assemble and experience reality suggests a very different view.
Imagine, for instance, that you are the subject of a brain imaging study. As part of this study, your have been asked to eat a generous slice of homemade apple pie. As you enjoy the pie, the brain scans capture images of the neurological activity in the various processing areas of the brain where input from your senses is being turned into the specific neural perceptions that add up to the experience of eating the pie…In a literal sense, the experience of eating the pie is all in your mind, but that doesn’t mean the pie is not real, or that it is not delicious.
I had an experience of Cthulhu a few nights ago. He was wearing pajamas with small black kittens printed on the fabric. Of course I was dreaming, but, nevertheless, neurologically I had the experience of sitting with Cthulhu clothed in kitten PJs. In a literal sense, the experience of sitting with Cthulhu was all in my mind, but that doesn’t mean Cthulhu is not real. Really?
Then there’s the end of the first paragraph – But a full understanding – that’s cheeky given the book is written for a general audience. The authors are claiming the right of might based on their authority as scientists who are capable of understanding and providing themselves a bat to batter anyone who disagrees. They can just say, “well if you understood the way the brain works…” Cheeky, and a sign of a poor grounding in evidence. I mean why would anyone who had decent evidence resort to such patently manipulative tactics?
Here’s the deal. The book has lots of good basic information in it but the authors’ argument for the existence of god sucks. This “analysis” left me wondering if they were “asked” to include bits to allay the fears of the god-fearing American public or if they just stop thinking once they are outside the realm of actual data. I’d love to know.
I’m reading Mark Johnson’s The Meaning of the Body. I’m not very far in, just past the introduction, but there was something there that really jumped out at me and (metaphorically) popped me one on the chin. I don’t think that’s a good thing, because now, as I read, I’m going to be looking rather carefully for similar oddities.
Here’s what Johnson said:
The “disembodied soul…must always remain a real possibility” despite the fact that such a proposiiton “is clearly at odds in the virtually contemporary biology, neuroscience, and cognitive science.”
Whoa, I thought.
In that paragraph he says all the evidence points away from the world the concept “disembodied soul” frames, and yet such a concept must remain a “real possibility.” Given the premise of the book, that what it means to experience (think, feel, be aware, constitute meaning) requires a body, it seems that this eviscerates any possible vitality to questions framed in a world built on the concept “disembodied.” If meaning for humans requires embodiment then there is no human meaning possible in a disembodied state. The idea of a disembodied human is meaningless.
Also, doesn’t allowing something a real possibility of existence require some sort of attention or work? Allowing the concept of “disembodied soul”: must we provide real effort to answering questions like “how many angels dance on the head of a pin” in order to meet whatever need Johnson is trying to address by saying such a thing as a this?
It’s a minor quibble, I know and probably “real” just refers to the idea that no question, no matter how imaginative must not be closed off from query by fiat. With this, of course, I agree. Questions such as angels on pins and immaterial souls need not be refused. They die from lack of nourishment because they have come to lack any contact with what we understand reality to be. I mean how many research dollars go into answering the angel/pin question any more?
So why was it necessary to include it in the introduction?
That is a question worth putting some effort into I suspect. One thing that it says to me is that there is a powerful “spiritual” lobby currently invested in the field of embodied cognition – and Johnson feels the need to either placate or at the very least address.
That makes me think of Bron Taylor and the questions I had about his rather important work in Dark Green Religion. But that’s for another post.
June 2nd, 2011
Italian justice and the mix up of religion and science
So Italy, that home of the contemporary Catholic virulence, is putting seven scientists on trial (literally) for failing to predict the L’Aquila earthquake that killed over 250 people in 2009.
They are. Really.
Of course the fact that earthquakes can’t be predicted doesn’t phase the Italian judicial system. Afterall, they have the Church and so they know predictions are in fact possible – with the right connections. And of course predictions are always timely and accurate when they come from that source.
The seven were placed under investigation almost a year ago, and today L’Aquila Judge Giuseppe Romano Gargarella announced that they will be tried. According to the Italian daily Corriere della Sera, Gargarella said that the seven defendants had supplied “imprecise, incomplete and contradictory information,” in a press conference following a meeting held by the committee 6 days before the quake. In doing so, they “thwarted the activities designed to protect the public,” the judge said.
Howl. “Imprecise, incomplete and contradictory information,” are you sure he wasn’t talking about the Catholic response to the pedophile scandal? Has Italy done anything about that? There is the treaty to consider, and the doctrine of pontifical secrecy, but really the Italian justice system seems loathe to act against the Church. I wonder if this says something about the desirability of a separation between church and state?
Does the esteemed judge have any conception at all of how science actually works?
If I was a scientist in Italy, I’d be packing my bags about now.