Religion

This sort of puts Mary Rosh in the ha’penny place:

The son of a prominent Dead Sea Scrolls scholar was arrested on Thursday on charges of identity theft, criminal impersonation, and aggravated harassment relating to a complex online campaign designed to smear opponents of his father’s theories. The Manhattan district attorney’s office alleged in a statement released on Thursday that Raphael Haim Golb, 49, son of Norman Golb, a professor of Jewish history and civilization at the University of Chicago, used dozens of Internet aliases to “influence and affect debate on the Dead Sea Scrolls” and “harass Dead Sea Scrolls scholars who disagree with his viewpoint.” …

The office contends that Mr. Golb impersonated and harassed Lawrence H. Schiffman, a professor of Hebrew and Judaic studies at New York University and a leading Dead Sea Scrolls scholar, by creating an e-mail account in Mr. Schiffman’s name and using it to send e-mail messages in which the sender admitted to plagiarism. Mr. Golb also allegedly supplemented that campaign to discredit Mr. Schiffman by sending letters to university personnel accusing Mr. Schiffman of plagiarism, and by creating blogs that made similar accusations. Two blogs, each with a single entry, accuse Mr. Schiffman of plagiarizing articles written by Norman Golb in the 1980s. …

Mr. Cargill began tracking the cyberbully—whom he calls the “Puppet Master”—two years ago after he himself was targeted. At the time, he was a doctoral student at UCLA helping to produce a film about Khirbet Qumran—the site in present-day Israel where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered—and its inhabitants for an exhibit on the scrolls at the San Diego Natural History Museum. Mr. Cargill said it was then that the aliases began attacking him and his film, both in e-mail messages to his superiors and on various Web forums, for failing to give credence to Norman Golb’s long-held theory about the origin of the scrolls and how they came to Khirbet Qumran. Some scholars, including Mr. Schiffman and Mr. Cargill, believe that the 2,000-year-old documents were assembled by inhabitants of Qumran. Mr. Golb, however, holds that they originated in Jerusalem and were transported to Qumran later.

Risa Levitt Kohn, a professor of religious studies at San Diego State University who curated the San Diego show and several subsequent Dead Sea Scrolls exhibitions, said she too has been “under regular attack” by Internet aliases since then, both in Web forums and in e-mail messages addressed to her superiors. “Sometimes the criticisms of me are straightforward and overt,” she told The Chronicle via e-mail, “and sometimes the letters appear reasonable but essentially demand that these individuals take note of previous exhibitions’ supposed ‘failings.’ Then they provide helpful suggestions to find solutions, almost always involving Norman Golb in one way or another.”

A number of other Dead Sea Scrolls scholars also said they have been harassed by mysterious Internet personas. Because the messages were written under aliases, they had little choice but to ignore them. “This person has posted horrible stuff about me online,” said Jodi Magness, a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “I don’t even look anymore, it makes me too upset.”

According to The NY Times, Golb Sr has commented, too:

Professor Golb said that opposing scholars had tried to quash his views over the years through tactics like barring him from Dead Sea Scrolls exhibitions. He said he saw the criminal charges as another attack on his work. “Don’t you see how there was kind of a setup?” he said. “This was to hit me harder.”

Sounds like this might get both uglier and more entertaining in equal measure.

From the “Chronicle of Higher Education”:http://chronicle.com/news/index.php?id=6065&utm_source=pm&utm_medium=en

Brigham Young University has rejected an appeal from a student who had completed all the requirements for a degree but saw his diploma withheld last year after he published Men on a Mission, a calendar of buff Mormon missionaries without shirts, the Associated Press reported.

The student, Chad Henry, was excommunicated from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which owns the university, over the calendar last July. In September he was told that, to receive his degree, he would need to be reinstated as a member of the Mormon church.

Which reminds me that anyone who hasn’t read Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s wonderful account of how she “came to be excommunicated”:http://nielsenhayden.com/GodandI.html by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints really doesn’t know what they are missing.

I have acquired a copy of R. Wilmott’s English Sacred Poetry of The Seventeenth, Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (1861) for the Dalziel brothers engravings. Which I am moderately pleased with. The book itself is fantastic looking. Comically heavy-bound and smoky-dark object. Zoë (age 7) got to see the thing before I did and her reaction shows she understands me well: ‘Daddy is going to love this. It even has water damage.’

And now I would like to report that the book contains the single worst argument against atheism yet devised. I present “The Atheist and the Acorn”, by Anne, the Duchess of Winchelsea. Complete with an engraving of the young PZ Myers by H.S. Marks: [click to continue…]

On X-Mas I gave good ol’ PZ a visit. He had up a quote from Rick Warren:

I believed that evolution and the account of the Bible about creation could exist along side of each other very well. I just didn’t see what the big argument was all about. I had some friends who had been studying the Bible much longer than I had who saw it differently…Eventually, I came to the conclusion, through my study of the Bible and science, that the two positions of evolution and creation just could not fit together. There are some real problems with the idea that God created through evolution… My prayer is that you will have this same experience!

The Bible’s picture is that dinosaurs and man lived together on the earth, an earth that was filled with vegetation and beauty…man and dinosaurs lived at the same time…From the very beginning of creation, God gave man dominion over all that was made, even over the dinosaurs.

After that, I decided to give my X-Mas presents the attention they richly deserved. The adverb that describes the way my mother-in-law shopped for me is ‘awesomely’. [click to continue…]

Via Leiter, this disturbing story about gnomes being banned from a church cemetery. This is the CofE: it seems a bit ironic that a church that not long ago had Bishops openly doubting whether God exists is so adamant about the non-existence of ‘real’ gnomes.

I’ve been puzzling over this “post”:http://www.stephenbainbridge.com/index.php/punditry/kmiec_as_ambassador_to_the_holy_see/ by Steve Bainbridge for a few days. Steve vigorously denounces a suggestion by Michael Winters that Douglas Kmiec be appointed ambassador to the Vatican, saying that such an appointment would be an insult to the church.

I take it that, as a general rule, one should not choose ambassadors whose appointment will insult the country to which they are credentialed. One would not expect Obama to appoint a known anti-Zionist as ambassador to Israel, for example. Yet, while Winters and other pro-Obama US Catholics might delight in tweaking the Holy father by appointing Kmiec as ambassador to the Vatican, it would be tantamount to sending Norman Finkelstein to Israel. Doug Kmiec chose to turn his back on a life time of support for conservative and, in particular, pro-life causes to endorse Barack Obama. … Since the election, Kmiec has further angered pro-life Catholics by, among other things, his recent love letter of praise for Edward Kennedy. … His main role in public life now seems to be giving cover to pro-abortion rights Democrats. The Vatican has made clear that a Kmiec appointment would be most unwelcome … Obama may have won the vote of a majority of America’s cafeteria Catholics. Even so, to appoint Doug Kmiec as ambassador to the Holy See would be an insult to both the Vatican and to “serious, loyal” Catholics everywhere.

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I see that David Benatar’s excellent book Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence has just come out in paperback. It’s almost enough to make me regret that I am on sabbatical this coming year. In my Contemporary Moral Issues course I always teach abortion as the first topic, because it gets them to read two of my favourite pieces of applied philosophy, Thomson’s A Defence of Abortion, and Marquis’s Why Abortion is Immoral. I also take a bit of time to discuss conceptual space, and used to use the view that abortion is always obligatory as an example of conceptual space that no-one occupies. Now, however, I include chapter 5 of Benatar’s book (Abortion: the ‘Pro-Death’ View) in the course packet. Benatar is a terse, unfussy, and careful writer: the argument is complicated, but the writing is excellent, and it is an easy, and compelling, read. I was annoyed that it first came out in an expensive hardback which I could not, in good conscience, assign, and feared that it would not sell well enough to be paperbacked. So, now I’ll be happy to assign it.

The opening lines give the basic structure of the argument:

Each one of us was harmed by being brought into existence. That harm is not negligible, because the quality of even the best lives is very bad-and considerably worse than most people recognise it to be. Although it is obviously too late to prevent our own existence, it is not too late to prevent the existence of future possible people. Creating new people is thus morally problematic.

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“Scott”:http://www.artsjournal.com/quickstudy/2008/08/verily.html at his other place blogs about the latest McCain video (which is so staggeringly bad at achieving its purported aims that it doesn’t make sense _except_ as a dogwhistle video).

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Steve Fuller gets “a good kicking”:http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2290401,00.html from the excellent Steven Poole:

bq. … Fuller happily adopts ID’s rhetorical tactics: speaking of biologists’ “faith”; forgetting to mention (or merely being ignorant of) the wealth of evidence for evolution in modern biology that wasn’t available to Darwin himself; and even muttering about the “vicissitudes” of fossil-dating, thus generously holding the door open for young-Earth creationists, too. The book is an epoch-hopping parade of straw men, incompetent reasoning and outright gibberish, as when evolution is argued to share with astrology a commitment to “action at a distance”, except that the distance is in time rather than space. It’s intellectual quackery like this that gives philosophy of science a bad name.

(Hat tip: SO)

I was lucky enough to see Martha Nussbaum give a lecture in Chicago a couple of weeks ago, based on her new book Liberty of Conscience: In Defence of America’s Tradition of Religious Equality (UK). I confess to having been a bit skeptical prior to the lecture. I always like reading Nussbaum’s work, and she’s a great speaker, but I’m not riveted by the topic, still less by historical investigations in philosophy, and am always put off by having the name of a country in the title (or subtitle) of a work of philosophy. The talk (and now the book) convinced me that I should be more open on all counts. She gave a fascinating account of the thought of Roger Williams, the founder of the colony of Rhode Island, and made a very convincing case that his arguments for freedom of religion anticipate, variously, two of Kant’s formulations of the Categorical Imperative, Rawls’s idea of the overlapping consensus, and Locke’s sharp claim (in the Letter) that the magistrate has responsibility for secular matters, but not for care of the soul. “Anticipation” must be the wrong word in at least Locke’s and Rawls’s cases, because she convincingly argued that Locke must have been aware of Williams’s arguments, and, although she did not argue this, it is reasonable to assume that Rawls was too. She also argued that Williams’s theory of religious equality is superior to Locke’s theory of toleration on several grounds, including that it does not depend on Protestant premises, that it is more extensive (Williams, weirdly enough, believed that not only pagans, but even atheists (whom he called “anti-Christians”) could be decent people), and that it is more demanding: his argument does not merely support a stricture against persecution (which Williams termed “soul rape”) as Locke’s does, but a stricture against establishment. All this, and the guy sailed back and forth between England and the colonies, learned numerous languages, including Indian languages, and spent months at a time living with Indians. Finally, in the book, she makes a strong case for that Williams’s principle of religious equality is not parochial, but has a great deal to say to other democratic cultures: it’s been enough to get me to examine (but not necessarily to reject) my casual antidisestablishmentarianism in the UK context. Despite having about a million things to do, I’m now half way through the book which is as good, and as interesting, as the lecture promised. Highly recommended.

I just spent an hour trying to make my way through the Popage – I had forgotten that the papal procession would be wending its way along Pennsylvania Avenue, which inconveniently cuts between my Metro station and my office. Eventually, the Pope made his way through, waving at the cheering crowds on both sides of the street, but even afterwards the street was closed (for some unexplained reason which I suspect had more to do with DC police overtime than security needs, they aren’t letting people cross the street again for another couple of hours).

It was an interesting contrast with the last time that I had seen a Pope in person – when John Paul II came to visit Ireland in 1979, I, along with a very significant chunk of the rest of the population, went to see him. This was probably the high-water mark of the Catholic Church’s influence in Ireland – the 1980s saw a series of largely successful defensive actions against encroaching secularism, while the 1990s saw a series of unsuccessful ones against teh gay (finally legalized in 1993), the introduction of condoms (which had previously been available only by prescription in order to try to limit their use to married couples), divorce, and the right to travel to obtain an abortion.

In particular, I was struck by the similarities between the 1979 Popemobile and the 2008 version – either the engineers haven’t much imagination, or there isn’t all that much you can do to improve the basic design (although I don’t remember the original having bulletproof glass). Nor was the 1979 experience complicated by evangelical Christians with bullhorns vigorously denouncing ‘false religion’ and telling the cheering nuns and folks in Pope Benedict t-shirts that they were all going to go to hell unless they were born again in Christ. Finally, I was intrigued by this sign (apologies for blurriness of photo; the camera on my phone is garbage), which seemed to me to have dark undertones that were presumably not intended by the person who was waving it about.

It seems to be children’s TV and organ procurement week here at CT; before I get started into something new I should probably note that Russell Arben Fox has “said everything I wanted to say”:http://inmedias.blogspot.com/2008/04/henry-farrell-and-keiran-healy-are.html in my earlier postbut has put it far more thoughtfully and eloquently. As the father of a two year old with an interest in the topic (albeit one whose TV diet is restricted to 2 hours on weekends, much to his disgruntlement), I’ve become much more intimately acquainted with the offerings of US children’s TV than I ever imagined possible or desirable. I’m especially interested in how US TV deals with the product of foreign cultures. Sometimes, it improves on them, as in the three dimensional _Noddy_ show. Not that it’s much good or anything, but the original books weren’t much cop either, and the frank racism of the original has been replaced by a soothingly multicultural Toytown in which PC Plod, oddly enough, is the only character to maintain a real English accent (I suspect serious dubbing of the UK original).

As an Irishman, I’m naturally more interested in _Jakers: The Adventures of Piggleywinks_ which is probably the most influential depiction of my native culture that millions of American children will ever be exposed to. And it’s surprisingly well done in my opinion – not classic Sesame Street good, but still not at all bad – you feel that the creators have taken some care in putting it together. Bits of the background, such as the national school ring reasonably true to my own upbringing, and even if it’s a concatenation of cliches, they’re well researched cliches. Most of the characters even have real Irish brogues (unlike “other shows with bigger budgets”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/10/19/bad-accents/), although the grandfatherly narrator seems to have mysteriously picked up a pronounced Dublin working class accent somewhere in his peregrinations between Raloo Farm and Amerikay.

Still, there’s one glaring omission from its depiction of rural Irish life in the 1940s – there’s no mention (at least in the episodes I’ve seen) of the Roman Catholic church, or any other church for that matter. Apart from their occasional utterance of the eponymous expression of surprise, you’d think that the villagers were as godless a crowd of humanists as ever warmed the cockles of PZ Myers’ heart. I can understand why the program producers made this choice – it would be hard to tackle the role of the church in 1940’s Ireland without falling into the one set of cliches or the other, and the bits after the main show seem designed to highlight the universalities of the immigrant experience rather than the particularities of one small country. But it still feels odd to me every time I watch the program; having grown up in a small market town with less than 2,000 inhabitants myself, I can testify that the Catholic church was not only important but omnipresent. It organized and disciplined the community in good ways and in bad. When I was around nine years old or so, we were told by the headmaster of the local Christian Brother’s school (the unloved Brother Ryan – I sometimes wonder what’s happened to the vicious old bastard since) that the local cinema was to be boycotted because it had dared to show _The Life of Brian._ One boy who broke the boycott, and was caught, got several strokes of the stick in front of the class for his pains; none of us found this at all remarkable at the time. Of course, the country (and the town, on the couple of occasions I have been back through it) have changed dramatically in the interim, and not entirely for the better; while I wouldn’t want to go back to the Ireland of the 1970s, let alone the 1950s, I find the consumerism and materialism of the new Ireland pretty unpleasant in its own way too.

John Gruber twittered the following:

bq. Suggestion for Gallup: how many Americans both (a) are offended by sermons of Obama’s Christian pastor and (b) think Obama is a Muslim?

Which led me to check out this Pew Center Report:

bq. The recent controversy surrounding sermons by Obama’s former pastor, Rev. Wright, and Obama’s March 18 speech on race and politics have attracted more public attention than other recent campaign events, according to Pew’s weekly News Interest Index. Nearly eight-in-ten (79%) say they heard at least something about Wright’s sermons (51% a lot, 28% a little) and about half (49%) have seen video of the sermons. … There is little evidence that the recent news about Obama’s affiliation with the United Church of Christ has dispelled the impression that he is Muslim. While voters who heard “a lot” about Reverend Wright’s controversial sermons are more likely than those who have not to correctly identify Obama as a Christian, they are not substantially less likely to still believe that he is Muslim. Nearly one-in-ten (9%) of those who heard a lot about Wright still believe that Obama is Muslim.

A letter from the Notre Dame Observer in response to an Op-Ed in the paper.