"Way of the agnostic" in NYT

Gutting writes on love, understanding and knowledge in the context of religion. He basically argues that religious people should appreciate those who want to partake in the community and aesthetics of religion although they find its knowledge/belief claims "a bridge too far"...

But love and understanding, even without knowledge, are tremendous gifts; and religious knowledge claims are hard to support. We should, then, make room for those who embrace a religion as a source of love and understanding but remain agnostic about the religion’s knowledge claims.  We should, for example, countenance those who are Christians while doubting the literal truth of, say, the Trinity and the Resurrection.  I wager, in fact, that many professed Christians are not at all sure about the truth of these doctrines —and other believers have similar doubts.  They are, quite properly, religious agnostics.

He presents such agnosticism as a sort of "middle way" between "no arguments" atheism, which is the presumption that the burden of proof lies on the religious, and the presumption by religion that faith justifies knowledge.

One of the more interesting passages takes me back to quite a few dialogs that I've had with believers over the years:

It may well be that physical science will ultimately give us a complete account of reality. It may, that is, give us causal laws that allow us to predict (up to the limits of any quantum or similar uncertainty) everything that happens in the universe.   This would allow us to entirely explain the universe as a causal system.  But there are aspects of our experience (consciousness, personality, moral obligation, beauty) that may not be merely parts of the causal system.  They may, for example, have meanings that are not reducible to causal interactions.

I would wager all my earthly goods that many people believe in religious knowledge claims because of these aspects of our experience. Religion has done a great job of packaging together some really hard-to-swallow claims about history and science with a much easier-to-swallow sense of appreciation for these aspects of our experience, and insisting they be taken together or not at all. Many believers I know have pointed this exact thing out to me before after a long dialog in which they may see that I have some good points/arguments in favor of rejecting some of their knowledge claims about history and science.

Here are some recent posts dealing with those same issues:

1. Accepting these knowledge claims is not evidence that theists have lower IQs - http://nonserviamergofiatlux.blogspot.com/2007/07/new-iq-study-on-theists-vs-atheists.html
2. The roots of anti-intellectualism in Evangelical churches - http://nonserviamergofiatlux.blogspot.com/2008/06/correlations-between-reading-and.html
3. Some people have assumed for years that with the advance of science, religion would disappear. They were wrong, largely because of these "aspects of our experience" listed above: http://nonserviamergofiatlux.blogspot.com/2006/11/more-things-change.html
4. Some religious people mistakenly see science and liberalism as threats, although they really aren't. http://nonserviamergofiatlux.blogspot.com/2008/05/kennedy-parishoners-on-threats-to-faith.html
5. The existential "cost" of atheism as regarding beauty, morality, meaning, etc. http://nonserviamergofiatlux.blogspot.com/2008/04/on-morality-and-hope-vs-godlessness.html

Kon Leong on career/goals

A wise guy. In the good way:

If you experiment in different jobs and functions in those two or three years out of school, you will have a much better shot at finding your sweet spot. And the sweet spot is the intersection between what you’re really good at and what you love to do. If you can find that intersection, you are set. A lot of people would kill for that because, at 65, they’re retiring and never found it. So don’t put so much emphasis on initial compensation. Don’t listen to all the harping from the family. Try to find your sweet spot and, once you find it, invest in that. You don’t want to get degrees just to do work you don’t really like. If you’re miserable, even if you make a lot of money, that’s still 40 years of your life.

He says a lot of other smart things in the interview, so it's worth reading (e.g., his innate strength is that he can "zoom in, zoom out")...

"Losing Our Religion" on NPR

Interesting series on the changes in religious affiliation. I've been harping on this topic for a while...

1. http://nonserviamergofiatlux.blogspot.com/2006/06/some-thoughts-on-religiosity.html
2. http://nonserviamergofiatlux.blogspot.com/2008/10/religiosity-redux.html
3. http://nonserviamergofiatlux.blogspot.com/2009/03/atheism-and-watchmen.html
4. http://nonserviamergofiatlux.blogspot.com/2009/09/religious-nones-and-crazy-people.html
5. http://nonserviamergofiatlux.blogspot.com/2009/07/gotta-love-south.html
6. http://nonserviamergofiatlux.blogspot.com/2009/05/pew-forum-on-changing-religious.html
7. http://nonserviamergofiatlux.blogspot.com/2009/03/god-is-backnot.html

Scientology

I have apparently never written on the topic, aside from a random link in a post about Scientology's effort to do away with CSICOP.

But after reading the book review on Wright's new hard-hitting journalistic manifesto, I had to link.

The thing that bothers me so much: everyone knows that L. Ron Hubbard was a science fiction writer before he "invented" Scientology. And when you read about what Hubbard claims is the "true" history of the universe, it makes you want to bang your head on your keyboard.

“The planet Earth, formerly called Teegeeack, was part of a confederation of planets under the leadership of a despot ruler named Xenu,” said Hubbard, who was a best-selling science fiction writer before he became the prophet of a new religion. To suppress a rebellion, Xenu tricked the confederations into coming in for fake income tax investigations. Billions of thetans were taken to Teegeeack (you remember: Earth), “where they were dropped into volcanoes and then blown up with hydrogen bombs.” Suffice it to say I’m not hanging around Earth next time I’m between lives. Hubbard apparently could go on for hours — or pages — with this stuff. Wright informs us, as if it were just an oversight, that “Hubbard never really explained how he came by these revelations,” but elsewhere he says they came to him at the dentist’s office. Of the Borgia-like goings-on after Hubbard’s death in 1986, Wright says cheerfully, “Every new religion faces an existential crisis following the death of its charismatic founder.” He always refers to Scientology respectfully as “the church.”

How can any sane person not understand that he was just creating more science fiction? What amazing revelation brought him this "knowledge"? It's really sad.

A more sane realization is that Hubbard likely invented the church just to get away with not paying some taxes. Then, after he realized how many suckers there are out there, it became a revenue stream for him, rather than a tax shelter...

To be honest, people in Christianity or Islam are not much better. They claim ancient people had "revelations" from angels or directly from God. They believe all the fantastic claims of the Bible and Quran about how the earth/people came to be. The amount of evidence for their claims is exactly equal to those of Hubbard.

Regulation of assault weapons

I like this take by Kristof, which hits the nail home in terms of stats and studies on gun violence:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calculates that each year there are more than 11,000 gun homicides and nearly 19,000 gun suicides. That’s 30,000 firearms deaths a year in the United States. At that rate, there have already been some 2,500 violent gun deaths since Sandy Hook. David Hemenway, a public health specialist at Harvard, says that having a gun at home increases the risk of suicide in that household by two to four times.
To reduce auto deaths, we’ve taken a public health approach that you might call “car control” — driver’s licenses, air bags, seat belts, auto registration. The result is a steady decline in vehicle fatalities so that some time soon gun deaths are likely to exceed traffic fatalities, for the first time in modern American history.

See, the point is that no one said we'd ban cars when we had auto deaths. Instead we applied more rules for how you get a car and track ownership. The government didn't "take away your cars" and they aren't going to do that now. But it's about time for registration and careful database tracking on every firearm, along with other commonsense measures to improve public safety (e.g., firing pin markers, bans on all "highly-lethal" ammo types...).

Mint the coin already

A debt ceiling bypass idea that I wrote about on January 2 that may have sounded "fringe" is now clearly mainstream: bypass the debt ceiling fight altogether using legal means. Don't let the Republicans' brand of economic terrorism (give me what I want or I will harm innocent third parties) survive as an option any longer. In our current political calculus, Republicans control only the House -- and that largely by gerrymandering -- yet feel that having 1/3 the political power entitles them to use the debt ceiling as 100% leverage to get further serious entitlement/spending cuts. Sadly, this is not the time to try to highlight their extremism by letting the US Govt Default date approach. Reforming that bunch is not going to happen.

So now is the time to mint the $1T platinum coin. (Or 1,000 $1B platinum coins, but why waste the metal?) And then instruct the Treasury Secretary to hold on to it and be prepared to deposit it at the Fed once the Republicans make it clear they're willing to blow up the economy if they don't get what they want. Take the debt ceiling off the table today, before all the hype and news attention centers on the fight.

Of course Republicans will scream tyranny and executive overreach. But it seems pretty clearly constitutional. And furthermore, it's Congress who racked up the bills. Tax cuts and unfunded wars and unfunded entitlement increases all happened on the Republicans watch. Now they're bitching because the Treasury has to borrow to pay the bills they incurred.

When a debate turns into an exhibit

Piers Morgan invited nutjob Alex Jones to "debate" gun control. Jones does not provide testimony or evidence to support an argument. He instead functions as a piece of evidence -- a talking exhibit against his own position:

Problems with atheism, cont'd

A NYT article by Susan Jacoby takes me back to familiar ground. In Jacoby's article, she discusses the lack of a secular community, in both the institutional and grass-roots sense, to form a supportive network and gain recognition and legitimacy. Until then discrimination against atheists will continue. She makes the case that atheism can present an existentialist argument that death is a final, perfect rest and therefore attaches no fear. Otherwise, atheists fall far short of offering hope -- or much of anything -- to the religious and non-religious alike in times of suffering.

Food for thought...

Execution is everything

I think my football coach friends can related to this concept very well:

Ideas, in a sense, are overrated. Of course, you need good ones, but at this point in our supersaturated culture, precious few are so novel that nobody else has ever thought of them before. It’s really about where you take the idea, and how committed you are to solving the endless problems that come up in the execution. The more I experienced this frustration firsthand, the more I came to appreciate how naturally suited I am to the job I used to think I never wanted to have when I grew up.

It may seem counterintuitive, but I would claim this really applies to scientific research as well, despite that Holy Grail/Eureka mentality of science (e.g., string theory, cancer cures...). It's not that people haven't come up with a number of novel approaches to solving a problem much like your own. It's that they either gave up on them or started working on them to run into a problem that technology has since changed or solved.

Future hopes of bipartisanship

The hope that a Grand Bargain may result in a New Fair Deal for Americans is probably futile. This opening after the election was a very good opening for the two parties to reach a big deal on rewriting the tax code and changing entitlements. It failed. I think everyone knows why. The Republicans continued to threaten tax cuts for 98% of Americans in order to win them for 2%, which they more than did. This while Obama kept re-drawing his lines in the sand, giving many liberals heartburn when they consider what is likely to happen over the debt ceiling fight. I should point out here that "Obama's 'new' revenues" or "Obama's higher taxes" (mock quotes added since the expiration of the Bush tax cuts is not Obama's "fault" or "plan" for new revenues) will add less to the Treasury over four years than the world's richest added to their own pockets in one year -- $241B.

So what incentive will Republicans have to negotiate any further revenues with Obama? Zero. What incentive will they have to take him right to the debt ceiling limit again, as they did in the summer of 2011? Every incentive imaginable. I mean, it's not like they're held back by some ethos on keeping their country's creditworthiness intact. My hope is that he grows a pair and ignores the debt ceiling all together. It's not a Constitutional limit on Presidential power. It's a stupid quirk, wherein the idiotic Congress passes a budget then limits their ability to honor it.

I can seriously see Obama giving up big on entitlements soon, this despite a very mediocre "win" on taxes. He started his negotiations with John Boehner with an ask of $1.6T in revenues. He ended up with $600B...37.5%! At this rate, if he hopes to "only" cut $400B in Medicare, it will end up being a trillion. And then the Republicans will turn around and run against the Democrats in 2014 as the "Party of Medicare Cuts" who started death panels for grandma.

Does the future hold any hope for more Democratic leverage through elections? No.

According to ace analyst Nate Silver, writing one week after the election, the Democrats have little to no chance of winning back the House in 2014 -- in large part thanks to increased gerrymandering by Republicans in 2010 -- and the WaPo's Chris Cilliza documents that only 15 of the 234 Republicans elected to the House in 2012 won in a district where Obama was also the winner. As The Economist pointed out, Democrats got 49% of the House vote to the GOP's 48.2%, but the Democrats got 32 less seats = 46.2% of seats. Only in America!

So in fact, the Democrats could only stand to lose more of their leverage. The only hope you could have is that they would parlay their electoral losses into the same sort of government-by-blackmailing and filibuster-every-single-bill madness that the past few years of GOP clusterfuc*ery have shown.

How to ignore the debt ceiling

Apparently, the President has some legal room to maneuver around the ridiculous debt ceiling; the Republicans' last great flaming political football.

UPDATE: WSJ says the $1T platinum coin idea is gaining traction...