Neighbors
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More on ID
Thud mentioned “the kind of ID that also rejects short-history ‘the world is 5000 years old’ creationism.” It's been my sense lately that "ID" is an effort by more moderate believers to distance themselves from the more literal, fundamentalist reading of a six-thousand-year-old universe. Look at the
Catholic church's official position: the Vatican holds that God created the universe, but it makes no claim as to how he did it. Very sensible, but too sensible for fundamentalists – who often are rabidly anti-Catholic as well.
The problem lies with the fact that creationists – and I mean the hard-core, 6k variety – take the issue very personally. I once stumbled onto a teen message board of a fundamentalist sect and jumped in on the question, “Do you believe in evolution?” I found that the kids’ initial reaction was always an emotional one. “I’m not descended from primal sludge!” was a common theme. While I fail to see how the origins of my species affect my personal worth and self-confidence, the thought of being able to trace the human race back to amoebas somehow offended their sense of personal dignity.
“Something that used to be sludge can’t possibly be a child of God,” they reason. “I am a child of God,” they continue, concluding with, “Therefore, I did not evolve from primordial soup.”
Not the most well-founded syllogism I’ve ever encountered, but these are emotions we’re dealing with, not reasonable, rational responses.
Accepting evolution is rejecting God. For them, it means rejecting the very bedrock of their lives: the Bible. It makes the Bible a liar, because the use of figurative language has largely escaped them as a possible interpretation. If “And the evening and the morning were the first day” (Genesis 1.5) can be interpreted figuratively, so can “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (John 3.16). If the Bible got it wrong about biology, then what confidence can we have in it regarding salvation.
This black-and-white, either-or thinking permeates the fundamentalist world.
All we had to do was elect an evangelical president to see that.
The Poll
More creationism nonsense in the news. This time, yet another poll:
In a finding that is likely to intensify the debate over what to teach students about the origins of life, a poll released Tuesday found that nearly two-thirds of Americans say that creationism should be taught alongside evolution in public schools.
The poll found that 42 percent of respondents hold strict creationist views, agreeing that “living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time.”
In contrast, 48 percent said they believed that humans had evolved over time; but of those, 18 percent said that evolution was “guided by a supreme being,” and 26 percent said that evolution occurred through natural selection. In all, 64 percent said they were open to the idea of teaching creationism in addition to evolution, while 38 percent favored replacing evolution with creationism.
The poll was conducted July 7-17 by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life and the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. The questions about evolution were asked of 2,000 people, and the margin of error is 2.5 percentage points. (Source)
Creationists will never get through their head that creationism is, at best, a philosophical theory, not a scientific one.
In the end, though, I have no problem with teachers mentioning the idea of ID and asking students what they think of it, as long as it’s not called science. What will it be called then? I don’t know. I don’t care, as long as it doesn’t take too much time from the already overburdened curriculum.
What was most striking about the poll was the data dealing with a simple question: Who should decide what’s taught?
The poll showed 41 percent of Americans want parents to have the primary say over how evolution is taught, compared with 28 percent who say teachers and scientists should decide and 21 percent who say school boards should. Asked whether they believed creationism should be taught instead of evolution, 38 percent were in favor, and 49 percent were opposed.
Parents decide? In the end, I guess they do – they’re going to elect the officials who will force this nonsense down the public’s throat. But should they have an active hand in deciding what’s taught?
What would a nice response be for a science teacher? Mine would be along these lines:
Great! Saves me some time. You’re going to do this pro bono, right? And while you’re at it, since I didn’t study any of this in college and am completely unqualified to teach it, why don’t you make out my lesson plans for me? And write and grade the tests? Shoot, just come in and teach, and I’ll simply serve as a pedagogical consultant. You do the work, I get the pay. Sounds great.
Maybe parents want to come in and decide the entire curriculum and teach it as well? Teachers will just wander about the internet…
Support from Your Principal
Erin O'Connor at Critical Mass has a fascinating and yet disturbing post about a way of dealing with student profanity...by allowing it.
An English high school has decided to cope with the problem of student profanity by tolerating it. Beginning this fall, students will be allowed to curse at their teachers, just so long as they don't say "f -- k" more than five times during a lesson. Part of the new policy involves keeping a running tally on the blackboard of how many times the word "f -- k" has been uttered during a given lesson--a practice that promises to distract students.
I for one would feel this as a complete abandonment on the part of the principal of any acknowledgment even of my authority as teacher.
Blue Ridge Parkway
Are you our sub?
A first-time experience and I keep quiet -- that can’t have happened too very often. But the details about the events of yesterday, fascinating though they were, will remain distanced from any comments I might make here about it. The experience: I was a sub. First time.
In an effort to gain a face in the local school system, I am trying substitute teaching, and I got my first call yesterday morning.
“Substitute teaching.” That in itself seems to be an oxymoron. Teaching is a profession requiring such intimate knowledge -- not the least of which, the kids’ names -- that "substitute teacher" has all the ring of “substitute shrink.”
“Yes, I know you’d rather be talking to Dr. White, but he’s away on urgent business and his office asked me to come down and fill in for him. Now then, what seems to be the problem?”
It just doesn’t seem like it would work.
Yet at an orientation session for new substitute teachers last week, I and other new subs learned that “subbing isn’t the glorified babysitting it used to be” and that subs are expected to continue on instruction. In other words, be a substitute teacher and not just a substitute authority figure. I'm not sure it was ever anything else, but I do think that there was less expectation of what subs would accomplish in the classroom, say, twenty years ago.
The Day
Seven years of teaching has taught me one invaluable thing about the profession -- take nothing they do personally. Any silly, probing, "let's-see-what- he-does-now" behavior is directed at my role, not my person. That realization will be key to being an effective sub.
I survived. Not only that, but I enjoyed it. It felt good to be in a classroom again. With the beginning of the school year here (and approaching in Poland -- 1 September), it was difficult to keep from feeling a tinge of sadness at the thought of not teaching this year. The call Friday morning helped alleviate that.
I spent the afternoon with a group of seventh graders, the first time I’ve worked with that age group in many years.
Six weeks of my student teaching was in a seventh grade classroom, and those kids, according to my reckoning, have just finished college, so it’s been a while.
Seventh grade -- an interesting age group, for they’re right on that border between “child” and “young adult,” beginning to realize that they’re not kids anymore but not quite sure how to handle that.
Neck Pigment
I've been fighting for some time with the term "redneck." While not racist, I think, it's classist. The same basic thing: making assumptions about an individual's character based on a stereotype of his racial, cultural, ethnic group.
Really, I try not to use that term.
And then feel guilty when I laugh at something like this.
Impersonal
In the spirit of St. Bernard’s via negativa, there are few things to make you more appreciative of your spouse than perusing on-line personals. “Tell me I’ll never be back out there,” Carrie Fisher’s character says to Bruno Kirby in When Harry Met Sally, and after looking through a few on-line personals, the “dating scene” shows itself to be most definitely “out there.”
A good personal ad is an art. Just try describing yourself and what you’re looking for in less than 200 words. Less is more difficult.
Piling words on top of each other is much easier than constructing well-written sentences. But despite the fact that this is the _first_ impression they’re making, no one -- neither men nor women -- takes it so seriously. Instead, we read things like, “Hmmm about me. I guess you can say I'm a pretty funny broad.” Already we’re smiling at how much her word choice has said about her. Scroll down and we find, "Ok, where to start… like many people, I feel that I am just not meeting the 'right people' out at bars” To begin with, start without the “where to start."
In advertising themselves, people tend to fall into cliché with alarming frequency – then wallow about in it. And it starts with the ad’s header:
- I'm a nice girl looking for her shining knight.
- Looking For Mr. Right
- Don't judge a book by its cover
- Is Miss Right out there?
- Looking for the right one.
- Looking for Adventure
- No DRAMA!
- lookn 4 u!!
Some communicate on so many levels (many of them distressful) that they seemed to be masterpieces of Freudian innuendo:
- Animal lover seeking non-puppy kicker
- Gotta pay the cost to be the boss
Yahoo! personals washed up more than its share of clichés and freaks, but there were some thoughtful openings as well.
Well, one: “carpal tunnel love.” It just makes me all the more thankful that I’m married, that I no longer have such worries as “Will I still be alone when I’m sixty-four?”
She’ll still need me; she’ll still feed me.
Post Mortem
The worst thing about an interview is the endless playback afterwards — twenty-twenty hindsight and all that. The one question that initially stumped you rattles around in your head until you work out an appropriate, non-stammering answer. Then, you hit yourself repeatedly with the question and the “I should have said this but was an idiot and didn’t see the obvious” answer that you’ve come up with in the car on the way home or pacing in the apartment once you get there.
An individual could get a complete transcript of the interview a week before it actually happens, a la Back to the Future, and still have a head filled with “I should have saids.”
More on the Soul
Thud challenged that my comment “The belief in a soul becomes increasingly more difficult to maintain in the light of evolutionary psychology and advances in cognitive science” is “an unfounded assertion”:
How does it become increasingly difficult to believe in a soul? It may be increasingly difficult to believe that one’s sense of self is entirely separable from the physical form, but that doesn’t mean there’s no soul. There’s an enormous chasm between saying “who we are is changed by what we are” -- I think that’s a safe statement -- and saying "we are nothing but meat."
It’s increasingly difficult because there are increasingly fewer things we can attribute to "the soul." Thud himself admits “who we are is changed by what we are,” but how is that logically possible if who we are intrinsically is spiritual? How can the physical affect the spiritual? The supposed miracles of the Bible show the reverse is generally the accepted view, but the belief in the soul requires the opposite to be true. A few questions then:
First, how could the soul be affected by the body? Simple -- memory. Memory and memory alone is what makes human identities possible, and if the soul is in any way equated with our “identity” (and if it’s not, what’s the point?), the memory will be a necessary component. So neurons firing a certain way in the hippocampus, the amygdala, or the mammillary somehow deposit a copy of activity in the soul? The soul is an all-in-one card reader? How does it work without stepping outside the boundaries of logical and basic scientific principles?
Second: we’re talking about the soul without even considering where it came from. If we believe in a God, then we’re his creation; if we believe the theory of evolution is a better explanation than the Book of Genesis, then we’re the products of millions of years of cosmic chance; if we want to hold both beliefs at once, we call ourselves proponents of intelligent design. I hold to option two. It’s the option that has the most scientific evidence. Now, if I hold to that option and assert that there’s a soul, then where the hell did it come from? How did millions and millions of years of cosmic bumper ball create something spiritual?
Third: What effect do sudden changes in a person’s identity have on the soul -- indeed, how is that even possible? What sort of “sudden changes” do I have in mind?
Phineas Gage, with his famous three-foot-seven-inch railroad spike through his head.
Some months after the accident, probably in about the middle of 1849, Phineas felt strong enough to resume work. But because his personality had changed so much, the contractors who had employed him would not give him his place again. Before the accident he had been their most capable and efficient foreman, one with a well-balanced mind, and who was looked on as a shrewd smart business man. He was now fitful, irreverent, and grossly profane, showing little deference for his fellows. He was also impatient and obstinate, yet capricious and vacillating, unable to settle on any of the plans he devised for future action. His friends said he was “No longer Gage.” (Source)
But we don’t have to look to 19th-century tragedies. Think lithium, anti-depressants, Prozac. I recall meeting with my grad school advisor and discussing this. “How many Kierkegaards have we destroyed with Prozac?” Indeed -- Kierkegaard, Mahler, and how many other manic-depressives would never have created their classics if they’d been born in the late twentieth century.
All the way back in 1979 there was an article about this. The abstract:
Twenty-four manic-depressive artists, in whom prophylactic lithium treatment had attenuated or prevented recurrences to a significant degree, were questioned about their creative power during the treatment. Twelve artists reported increased artistic productivity, six unaltered productivity, and six lowered productivity. The effect of lithium treatment on artistic productivity may depend on the severity and type of the illness, on individual sensitivity, and on habits of utilizing manic episodes productively. (Source)
But we don’t even have to look at medication for drastic changes. Watch some of your friends when they’re drunk.
So it’s not that I’m suggesting that there isn’t a soul. I’m simply saying that logic and science combine to show that there are, as Steven Pinker expressed it, fewer and fewer hooks on which to hang the soul.