With the Horses
general
Protesting Protesters
Here in Asheville Saturday we had what one blogger called a "Hatefest." It was, in short, a rally to support family values -- in other words, condemn homosexuality.
With his Bible tucked under his arm like so many others around him, Jim Ballard stood in the middle of Pack Square to stand “for what the word of God stands for… not against anyone, but against sin.”
Ballard joined a crowed of more than 200 assembled downtown on Saturday to support Wolf Laurel Ski Resort and other businesses that defend their right to choose not to employ homosexuals.
Wolf Laurel fired a lesbian couple after they placed a wedding announcement in the local paper upon returning from Massachusetts. Apparently the proprietors of the resort a "good Christians" and fired the wretched, evil lesbians. Sparking a protest. Which in turn sparked a protest.
“They are trying to make a statement so we as Christians are trying to make a statement,” said Wendell Runion, president of International Baptist Outreach Missions Inc. and organizer of the event.
Runion, who also spoke at U.S. Rep. Charles Taylor’s prayer breakfast earlier the same day, said the rally was not meant to debate the issue of homosexuality and same-sex marriage, but to make a declaration solidly against it.
Taylor, R-Brevard, said he was supportive of “Christian businessmen trying to be Christian in their work lives as well as in their personal lives” when asked about the rally. Taylor did not attend the rally. (Citizen Times)
That sort of talk -- "We're not here to debate it, but to oppose it!" -- makes me think of, say, the Taliban.
Doubt that?
Combine it with the dominion theology of Rod Parsley and others, and it's clear to see that a theocracy is their ultimate goal.
As the cliche goes, "God, save us from your followers."
See Citizen Times article and BlogAsheville for more info.
Hiking
Autism
Here’s a story about an autistic teen — worth the read, and make sure you watch the embedded video to the right.
Knockin’ on Heaven’s [Car Door Window]
Last night at two, Kinga and I were awoken by extremely loud music coming from the parking lot behind our building. Unable to go back to sleep, I went out to the car to ask them to turn the music down. I knocked on the driver’s window. No response, and no wonder – he had his tongue down his date’s throat. I checked the license plate and headed back in.
In the meantime, the music became not-quite-so-loud – don’t know what happened – and I decided not to make an issue of it.
I got back into the apartment, slid back into bed, and suddenly the volume jumped up again.
Putting my sweatpants back on, I mumbled a curse and picked up my cell phone. If this guy causes problems, I think, I’ll just call the police while I’m standing there.
I go back out to the car, and knock on the driver’s window. This time, it’s a girl in the driver’s seat. Facing the rear of the car. With her head pressed against the roof.
Wonder what was going on.
She looks over at me, and slides off the guy to the passenger seat as he powers down the window.
“We’re done,” he says softly.
“Doesn’t appear that way, but whatever you say,” I think, but instead, simply point out the time and the proximity of our bedroom window.
“We’re all done,” he repeats, with an embarrassed grin.
"Why are you telling me this?" I think.
I turn to go and he calls out an apology.
The music ceased, but I never heard a car engine start in the half hour or so it took me to fall back asleep.
Un-spinnable Proof
Now that there exists video proof that W knew before Katrina that there was a serious risk to the levees, how is he going to try to spin his way out of this?
"I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees."
That outright lie should make any thinking person sick.
Review: How We Believe
Despite occasional comments that the world would be better off without religion, I like to think of myself as an agnostic who is at the very least sympathetic to religion, and certainly fascinated by it. I once described it to a professor with the metaphor of watching people dance without being able to hear the music.
It’s no wonder then that I was attracted by the title alone to Michael Shermer’s _How We Believe: The Search for God in an Age of Science_. Shermer is better known as head of the Skeptics Society and for his _Why People Believe Weird Things_, and while it might not seem likely from these credentials, Shermer is — by his own account — sympathetic to religious belief himself. Perhaps not sympathetic — understanding. That fact sets him as an outsider looking in on religious belief.
That wasn’t always the case. There was a period when Shermer considered himself a Christian. A fundamentalist, even. He once gave a professor a copy of Hal Lindsey’s _The Late, Great Planet Earth_ in an effort to proselytize. Instead of seeing the light, the professor
Saw red and hammered out a two-page, single-space typed list of problems with Lindsey’s book. I still have the list, folded and tucked neatly into my copy of the book. (6)
Eventually Shermer abandoned the Christian worldview for a materialist view of the world. He was still intrigued by religion, though, and this led eventually to him exploring how people believe.
This is not to be confused with the question of “Why people believe.” Shermer begins the book by explaining “the God problem” is insoluble. He is not out to disprove God’s existence, for that can’t be done, he argues. He also holds that God’s existence can’t be proved, and that therefore the most logical position for him is that of agnosticism.
To explain further, Shermer uses Donald Symons’ question, “Do you believe in [fill in any three letters] exists?” then quotes Symons extensively:
You have to know more about what’s in the brackets and how its existence or nonexistence might be determined or, at least, what kinds of evidence might potentially bear on the question. If you find out that the questioner has no ideas about the characteristics of the [ ] (such as, for example, whether it is made of matter), and more importantly, states that no conceivable observation could have any bearing on the existence/nonexistence question, then to me the original question is meaningless, or incoherent, or empty, or some similar concept. (10)
Since we cannot know — in a scientific sense — any of these characteristics, then it becomes a matter of faith. And that’s more or less where Shermer leaves it.
Shermer’s goal, then, is to explore the notion of belief from a strictly psychological, biological, generally scientific point of view. In other words, how did belief evolve?
To do this, posits “The Belief Engine.” Humans are pattern-seeking animals, Shermer notes, and “humans evolved a Belief Engine whose function it is to seek patterns and find causal relationships, and in the process makes mistakes in thinking” (39). Religion is not the inevitable outcome, though: “under certain conditions it leads to magical thinking while under different circumstances it leads to scientific thinking” (38). Yet how could this possibly work?
Humans evolved to be skilled pattern-seeking creatures. Those who were best at finding patterns (standing upwind of game animals is bad for the hut, cow manure is good for the crops) left behind the most offspring. We are their descendants. The problem in seeking and finding patterns is knowing which ones are meaningful and which ones are not. Unfortunately are brains are not always good at determining the difference. The reason is that discovering a meaningless pattern (painting animals on a cave wall before a hunt) usually does no harm and may even do some good in reducing anxiety in certain environments (38).
Shermer then outlines two kinds of thinking errors:
Type 1 Error: Believing a falsehood
Type 2 Error: Rejecting a truth
Shermer continues:
In some cases, neither of these errors will automatically get us killed, so we can live with them. […] The Belief Engine is an evolved mechanism for helping us survive, because in addition to committing Type 1 and Type 2 errors, we also commit what we might call a _Type 1 Hit: not believing a falsehood_ and a _Type 2 Hit: Believing a truth_.
One might wonder whether the book at this point is starting to take a somewhat antagonistic view of religion. It’s an almost a Golden Bough-ian view of religion: cave paintings and magical thinking led eventually to cathedrals and theology.
Daily Dose
We have a particular friend here in Asheville–a Polish friend we’ll call Franek–who can get caught in the such pessimistic moods about the nature of “the system,” about his own inability change that system, about the amount of suffering in the world–in short, about the “human condition”–that it’s made me say, “Damn, Franek! I thought I was a pessimist!”
And I did, and indeed I was. I was a half-glass-of-bile-a-day guy for a little while, though my episodes usually only lasted, say, the duration of a visit to a museum. In the National Gallery in Berlin, I felt sick to my stomach thinking of the money I’d paid to see idyllic paintings of Tahitians (Yes, it was a Gauguin exhibition.) when the majority of the people in the world had to scrounge for survival.
But I bounced out of it, probably because of my profession. Teaching is, at it’s core, simply the act of helping people understand and practice something–math, a foreign language, cosmetology–better. Right now, working with autistic primary school children, the skills I’m trying to help students master are much more basic than a second language or expository writing. As such, I see daily progress, and I often get my daily dose of hope many times over.
Talking to Franek, I said that I see miracles every day. I’d never thought of teaching like that, but that’s precisely what I mean by getting a daily dose of hope, corny as that sounds. In individual students I’ve seen enough improvements in behavior and impulse regulation, communication, social skills, and a host of other challenges unique to autistic children, that I can easily say to myself, “I have made a difference.” It has certainly been a team effort, and my part might have in fact been minimal. But minimal is better than nothing.
Ognisko
The Alternative?
The battle lines are drawn again. South Dakota’s legislature has voted to make abortion illegal in all circumstances. No exceptions.
A direct attack on Roe v. Wade is coming from the South Dakota legislature. The new bill, which outlaws abortion, makes no exceptions, not for a pregnancy caused by incest or rape. It would only be legal -- the only exception if it would save the pregnant woman's life.
Doctors who perform abortions could face up to five years in prison. The bill passed the State Senate 23-12. It's expected to pass the House again and then go to Governor Mike Rounds' desk. The bill's sponsor says he thinks the antiabortion movement has momentum on its side and a -- quote -- “change in national policy on abortion is going to come in the not-too-distant future.” (MSNBC)
With Alito and Roberts now on the Supreme Court, the intention couldn’t be any clearer: a full-scale assault on Roe v. Wade.
There's a good piece in the Village Voice about South Dakota's strategy.
Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, just after I was born. As an adoptee, I have wondered many times about what would have happened had Roe been a year earlier. Knowing next to nothing about my birth mother, it’s a question that will never have an answer. If I had the opportunity to ask my birth mother, it might still go unanswered. Thirty-three years of introspection would produce a very different response, I’m sure.
This fact alone serves as the foundation for my very mixed feelings about legalized abortion. On the one hand, I walk lock-step with other bleeding-hearts in saying that a woman’s body is just that -- not mine, but hers. And yet, thinking about the possible abortion of what became my body, I think, “Hey, wait -- I have something to say in this too.”
“What became my body?” What was it before? Abortion opponents have a point that if the fetus is human, there is very little to talk about, and very few instances when abortion can be ethically defensible. Is it human? I don’t know. And the purpose of this post is not to ruminate over the slippery slope of when a fetus becomes a human.
All that being said, I remain pro-choice, but with a lump in my throat. I remain nervously pro-choice. Like many, I would like to live in a world in which abortion is a woman’s legal right, but never, ever necessary. A utopia, in other words.
Anti-abortion activists should be working to make that utopia a reality, but I don’t see much happening in that way. Indeed, this is what bothers me most about the various camps that make up the anti-abortion movement: their unwillingness to help provide a viable alternative, namely adoption. How many children has the average women’s health clinic picketer adopted? How many protest by example? It seems to me that if these individuals feel so strongly about the issue, they would literally put their money where their angry, raised voices are and adopt, adopt, adopt.