The True Cross is coming to Tucson!
The [“Relics of the Passion”] exhibit is part of a six-state tour that will take place during Lent. The eight relics include what are believed to be remains from Jesus’ crown of thorns, a piece of exterior wrapping from the Shroud of Turin that some say was Jesus’ burial sheet, and a sliver from the cross used to crucify him. A replica of one of the nails used to hang Christ on the cross also will be part of the display. Though it’s not an actual nail used in the crucifixion, organizers say it’s made from shavings of some nails that were.
“Certainly, if people saw the movie, now it’s time to venerate the relics,” said tour organizer Richard Jeffrey, past state deputy for the Arizona Knights of Columbus …
I wonder how much they’ll be charging people to see them. If it’s cheap enough, I’ll have to go along. The tour is being organized by the Apostolate For Holy Relics, an organization based not in the Vatican City, but out of a Post Office Box in Los Angeles. You can save yourself a trip and see photos of the relics on the AFHP’s website, though mostly you just see the reliquaries of the relics.
I honestly can’t believe it.
Via American Coprophagia. In the midst of a heartfelt Congressional prayer service, Tom DeLay chose this reading, from Matthew 7: 21-27:
21. “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.22. Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name? Did we not drive out demons in your name? Did we not do mighty deeds in your name?’
23. Then I will declare to them solemnly, ‘I never knew you. Depart from me, you evildoers.’
24. Everyone who listens to these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock.
25. The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and buffeted the house. But it did not collapse; it had been set solidly on rock.
26. And everyone who listens to these words of mine but does not act on them will be like a fool who built his house on sand.
27. The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and buffeted the house. And it collapsed and was completely ruined.” (my emphasis; I don’t think that DeLay emphasizes any particular passage)
Living in a narrow strip hemmed in by the sea and backwaters, only those who were able to climb atop strong houses could manage to survive the tsunami strike. Showing a spot where a house once stood, Susheelan said only an old man of a family of five survived the mortal blow of the sea. The man is now in a relief camp near the place where his kith and kin are buried.
You can watch the service yourself on C-SPAN (it’s the “109th Congressional Prayer Service”). Tom DeLay starts at 12:30. This was not an off-the-cuff joke or unfortunate phrase; these were his prepared remarks, in total.
How would we have reacted to a powerful Arab mullah who appeared on television, on September 20, 2001, to read a passage from the Koran about how the fools who reject Allah will be thrown from their towers? (I seriously doubt that such a passage exists, but you get my point.)
I had to take a break from blogging. I was tired of getting so angry. But when Tom DeLay is one of the most powerful men in the United States, what other response is appropriate?
I’ve been wanting to post some observations on the British government’s proposal to criminalize incitement to religious hatred. The issue may be now be moot, thanks to the departure of David Blunkett, but there were assumptions made in the standard blog critique (SBC) that I wasn’t happy with. There were also considerations omitted that I thought should have been given some weight. Let me stress that I don’t think that this bill should have passed. Nevertheless the arguments in the SBC were seriously defective and/or incomplete.
So what was wrong with the SBC?
(1) The SBC thinks of free speech on libertarian lines: there’s the little blogger (or journalist, or man in the pub) who wants to say something, and the nasty government which wants to stop them. Even though, the SBC sometimes concedes, what is said may provoke hatred against Muslims (for example), it would be very very dangerous to leave governments with discretion over what does or does not constitute hate speech. But I don’t accept that we should start by thinking about free speech on the model of individual rights versus nasty government. Rather, in a just state, we should assure people both of certain basic political freedoms and of the fair value of those freedoms. And that assurance of fair value means that we-the-people have to do some regulation in order to give everyone a fair opportunity to have their voice heard in the public forum.
What does this require? Well, most obviously it requires some regulation of media ownership, access to the airwaves and so on. States and societies where broadcasting is dominated by a few conglomerates or where the money people make film-makers tone down the anti-religious content of their films , are seriously defective from a free-speech point of view. It isn’t the intervention of the state that’s a problem here, it is its silence. (And cue suitable extension of the argument to money-in-politics generally).
But second, and most pertinent in this discussion, securing a fair opportunity of access to all may mean we have to get some people to shut up! Most obviously this restriction of speech for the sake of speech has a place in formal debates: people speak through the chair, they can’t exceed their allotted time, mustn’t interrupt others, etc. But beyond that special formal setting, it cannot be excluded (and certainly not a priori ) that restrictions are sometimes justified. One of the purposes of hate speech — and other forms of intimidation, such as private employers threatening to sack people — is to cow its targets (and their defenders) into submission, and to create a climate where only the very bravest are willing to express themselves. In my view, securing a fair opportunity for all to express reasoned argument in the public forum ought to trump any unrestricted right to “free expression”.
Note that this cuts all ways. The right of apostates to express their apostasy, of gay Muslims to express their views etc, is plausibly threatened by hate speech directed at them by the ultra-religious. I’m not suggesting “offensiveness” as a test, but fair access for all. And I’d like to enter a caveat: those putting the SBC are right about the untrustworthiness of the state in the real world, so I’m pragmatically averse to state-imposed speech restrictions. I’m just saying that guaranteeing a fair opportunity to put a point of view in a way that acknowledges the right of others also to put their point of view is fundamental, rather than individual right of free expression.
(2) Many advocates of the SBC write about religion being a matter of choice, or religion consisting of a body of doctrine which ought to be open to critique etc. I basically agree, though I think people sometimes overstate the chosenness of religion. But their insistence on these points amounts to an almost wilful neglect of another, namely that even if religion is a matter of choice, religious identity may not be. There are societies where “Are you a Catholic atheist or a Protestant atheist?” is a sensible question, and I think it reasonable to suppose that strictly doctrinal differences play a limited role in the opinions of Glasgow Rangers supporters about Catholics, just as the “nationalist” skinheads who beat up a gay Muslim for being, among other things, a Muslim, are not that interesting in debating the finer points of Islamic jurisprudence. The lack of actual religious beliefs among many Bosnian Muslims, does not seem to have lessened the animosity of their Serb or Croat persecutors.
SBCers have asked why religion should get special protection. Well it shouldn’t. In particular circumstances the group whose members may be being denied a fair opportunity to participate in public life by hate speech may be those with a particular religious identity, gays, women, racial or ethnic groups, etc. If is is true that there is such exclusion, then there’s a prima facie justification for laws that address that, and a law that’s appropriate for postwar Bosnia, say, may not be appropriate for Illinois. And there’s the questions of whether such laws will do more harm than good, whether they will be effective, and so on.
Is it in fact true that Islamophobic hate speech is denying Muslims in the UK a fair opportunity to play their role as citizens of a democracy? No, I don’t think it is. (And, certainly, and pretty obviously, much of the speech that Muslims are offended by, such as The Satanic Verses has no such exclusionary effect.) But if Muslims were, actually, being denied fair access to the public realm by hate speech, that would, in principle, provide grounds for the limitation of such speech.
I’m trying very hard to imagine what the film version of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials is going to be like if The Times is to be believed. According to an article today, the film’s director is cutting all references to God and the church from the script, for fear “of a backlash from the Christian Right in the United States.” Instead, the sinister ‘Authority’ (read horrid amalgam of Calvinism and the Catholic Church) of the novel will be taken as representing any old repressive establishment that you might care to oppose yourself - totalitarian, Marxist or what-have-you. This seems to me (and I suspect to most of Pullman’s readers) to be utterly mad - the entire point of the series is that it’s an extended diatribe against organized religion. Pullman is a vociferous member of the Devil’s party, even if his vague humanistic alternative to Christianity (described in the greatly inferior final volume of the series), is decidedly droopy.
It also says some interesting things about the comparative state of debate over religion in the UK and the US. In the UK, the Anglican establishment seemed to be quite delighted with Pullman’s books - that someone took Christianity seriously enough to attack it was cause for celebration. In the US, in contrast, the movie’s financial backers are clearly terrified of a backlash from fundamentalists who are anything but interested in vigorous debate about the merits and defects of organized Christianity. Anti-semitic movies about the Passion are all very well and good, but pull-no-punches atheism and criticism of organized religion apparently are not. Of course, this may just be nerves on the part of the money people (in fairness, Gibson’s magnum opus got squeamish responses from potential backers too), but it is interesting how little public space there is for the expression of atheistic views in the US. I’m neither religious nor a card-carrying atheist myself (I’d describe myself as a mostly-lapsed Catholic), but it seems to me that it doesn’t do any great service to genuine religious debate if a well argued and intellectually coherent perspective on religion is denied any space in popular culture.
Update: slightly revised following comments.
Pharyngula has a post about how the Texas School Board is trying to exclude not just the mention of evolution from school textbooks, but also references to pollution, global warming, overpopulation, contraception and “married partners” (might include gays). (This kind of thing doesn’t alarm the Dupe, who argues — if “argues” is the right word — that Bush’s victory is a triumph for the forces of secularism.)
Following up John Quiggin’s follow-up to my first post on Silenced and Left Behind-style tribulit generally, a couple quick links and thoughts.
First, as a commenter reminded me, the Slacktivist has a long series of insightfully barbed posts adding up to a close reading of the first 66 pages of Left Behind. Start at the bottom and work up.
Second, Maud Newton has an interview with Chris Lehmann, including a link to a Lehmann essay in The Revealer. Actually, it’s part three of three on religious themes. It’s about author Joel “The Last Days” Rosenberg. I’ll just quote the last bits:
And at one point, as I am talking with Rosenberg, GOP strategist Grover Norquist drops by to congratulate Rosenberg on the new novel. When I greet Norquist, he announces that things have never been better: “We’re winning on all fronts.” I gesture over to Rosenberg and offer the mock protest “But he thinks the end of the world is coming.” At which point, Rosenberg mildly avers: “Not just yet.”
Maybe that answers John’s question about who is going to feed the cat.
I am still torn between thinking these silly novels are mostly harmless, apart from being badly written, and suspecting they are seriously pernicious - the worst of both worlds when it comes to cynical political calculation and severe cognitive dissonance. (To be fair, I don’t know whether the Rosenberg book is badly written. I have now empirically verified, by means of valid samples, that LaHaye and Jenkins are execrable stylists.)
You might wonder how I can doubt these novels are pernicious in effect if not authorial intent, in light of Norquist’s cynical glee. (No doubt the government will be easier to drown in a bathtub after the Rapture erodes the tax base.) The trouble is that I still look to my own case and notice I, too, enjoy consuming books and movies in which morality is entertainingly oversimplified and even seriously distorted. I enjoyed reading The Stand in high school (hence all the heavy-handed references in my first post.) Apocalyptic clashes between Good and Evil put the Fun back in fundamental. It’s fun to conceive of Evil as a lurking, malignant, external thing. “Mum, dad, don’t touch it. It’s EVIL.” But Time Bandits never confused me about metaethics. I never believed Evil has a definite spatial location.
But maybe it’s different when people actually have religious convictions - about Apocalypse, in particular. Then Apocalypse will not be potential fairy tale material but as real as a stone in the road. Folks who believe some version of the story will insist the version that gets told should reflect their sincere convictions. Whatever the way the best-seller then gets told tells you what these folks’ true convictions are.
But I - and lots of other people - seem capable of enjoying, for example, cop buddy actions films without becoming seriously delusional about the ethical propriety of callously blowing the bad guys up and away. You leave the theater, turn off the DVD, that nonsense slides off, leaving nary a moral slick on the soul. (Well, maybe a very small one.) I have my true beliefs about how cops should act. I enjoy them acting badly in movies, while somehow being stipulatively ‘the good guys’. It’s complicated obviously. In part I’m just letting my id run around wearing a superego hat. Lord knows why it loves to do that, but it does. I have my real morality, on the one hand, and my just-for-fun cop movie morality, on the other. It’s like the real one seen through a funhouse mirror of genre. (Brian? Care to take up the cudgels of imaginative resistance to morally deviant fictional worlds?) Why shouldn’t Christians have their sincere religious convictions and their just-for-fun religious convictions?
If only William James had added another chapter to his fine and nuanced treatments of ‘conversion’, ‘saintliness’, ‘mysticism’ and so forth: Bruckheimeresque religious experience. Oh, Lord, make me pure, but not for the next 90 minutes of thrills, spills, chills and kills.
Yusuf Islam — the former singer once known as Cat Stevens — has been banned from the United States . And not just banned, they actually diverted the plane 600 miles to Maine to remove him from it. He’s made some equivocal statements in the past, but more recently has been forthright in his condemnation of terrorism . Perhaps there’s something we don’t know, but, on the surface, this looks like a bad mistake. Ordinary Muslims will be bound to see this as hostility to their religion as such rather than just to extremists and terrorists.
The recent visit to Britain of Shaikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi and his reception by London mayor Ken Livingstone generated a lot of controversy. I confess that I was a little bit skeptical about some of the claims made about him by his opponents on a “they would say that, wouldn’t they?” basis. His latest declaration calling on Muslims to fight the Americans in Iraq and including civilians as legitimate targets should remove any doubt. Juan Cole — who can read the Arabic sources and is not one of the people who recycles the ravings of Daniel Pipes — is disgusted, and provides a good deal of further background .
Tariq Ramadan has an article in the New York Times responding to the revocation of his visa and to some of the accusations made against him.
According to Scott Martens at A Fistful of Euros , Tariq Ramadan (recently interviewed by OpenDemocracy) who had been appointed to a visiting position at Notre Dame, has been denied a US visa under sections of the Immigration and Nationality Act that were amended by the Patriot Act. Scott comments:
Whether one agrees with Ramadan or not, it is difficult to image an Islamic intellectual figure who is likely to be more acceptable as the other side in an American dialogue with Islam. Thus, the refusal to allow him to enter the US suggests that someone in Homeland Security agrees with the Daniel Pipes standard: Any Muslim who fails to condemn Islam, from its founding to the present and in all its manifestations, must be a fanatic and a threat to the West. …. This is an opportunity for Europeans and Americans to show that at the very least they are capable of exercising better judgement than the Bush administration.
The (London) Times is running a series on Muslims in the UK . Not profound stuff, but a useful antidote to the demonization that prevails in parts of the blogosphere. Unsurprisingly, it turns out that young Muslims have views about sex and alcohol (among other things) that resemble in important respects the views that many young Catholics have about contraception.1
1 The article is freely accessible from within the UK, but may require registration from elsewhere. My information about whether those attempting to access from elsewhere need to subscribe varies.
In the light of some recent discussions at Butter flies and Wheels, Daily Moiders , Harry’s Place, Normblog , and even here, I thought I’d post a link to this OpenDemocracy interview with Muslim intellectual Tariq Ramadan , which I found of interest.1 I also see that Norm has just posted some lines from Andre Glucksmann on anti-semitism in France which are sort-of relevant, since a polemic against Glucksmann (among others) raised accusations of anti-semitism against Ramadan, a charge Ramadan rejects in the O-D interview.
1 Since these are sensitive times, and readers sometimes think that linking suggests endorsement, let me insist, self-defensively and for the record, that I’m not endorsing, just linking to something interesting.
Swift brash flash of blue
Nobly shielding your fledglings
Can’t I mow the lawn?
One thought that went through my mind during the recent fuss over the visit of Yussef al-Qaradawi to Britain was this: what did those who, after September 11th, uttered variations on “Islam needs a Reformation” expect the agents of such a Reformation to look like? Martin Luther or Calvin maybe? Because those guys had some pretty nasty views, and yet ….
Marc Mulholland has written a very useful and serious post on “liberal Islamophobia” over at Daily Moiders, and, in comments, Anthony Cox responds.
The comments on the recent post about Focus on the Family’s distribution of Michael Moore’s home address have occasionally drifted into anti-Christian sentiment, which was very much not what I was hoping for. For a more heartening look at conservative Christianity:
The Southern Baptist Convention, a conservative denomination closely aligned with President Bush, said it was offended by the Bush-Cheney campaign’s effort to use church rosters for campaign purposes.“I’m appalled that the Bush-Cheney campaign would intrude on a local congregation in this way,” said Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission…
The Bush campaign defended a memo in which it sought to mobilize church members by providing church directories to the campaign, arranging for pastors to hold voter-registration drives, and talking to various religious groups about the campaign…
But on Friday, Land said, “It’s one thing for a church member motivated by exhortations to exercise his Christian citizenship to go out and decide to work on the Bush campaign or the (John) Kerry campaign. It’s another and totally inappropriate thing for a political campaign to ask workers who may be church members to provide church member information through the use of directories to solicit partisan support.”
I disagree with the Southern Baptists on many things. At the same time, I have great respect for this enthusiastic defense of the boundaries between church and state from a religious organization . Furthermore, their apparent acknowledgement that it’s just as legitimate for congregants to feel moved by Christian principle to work for Kerry as Bush is highly welcome. My heartfelt thanks to the Southern Baptists for this bit of culture war disarmament.
P.S. More on Focus on the Family here (funny!) and here (not funny; it’s a FOTF ad).
AND ANOTHER THING: A small point about that ad- who is that sad little boy supposed to be? In context, it only makes sense if he’s supposed to be a boy raised by gay parents, upset because he doesn’t have both a father and a mother. How, exactly, is a constitutional amendment preventing his parents from marrying each other supposed to help him?
Eugene Volokh posts a table from a poll showing that about 60 percent of Americans say they believe Biblical stories like the 7-day creation, Noah’s flood and Moses’ parting of the Red Sea to be literally true. This is rather higher than other estimates I’ve seen of Biblical Literalism. Based on GSS data (the GSS is the best available public opinion survey in the U.S. with a long time-series), we know that in 1998 about 30 percent of Americans agreed with the statement “The Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally, word for word”. This was down from about 40 percent in 1988. (Most of the decline seems to have happened in the late 1980s, however.) About half of Americans agree that “The Bible is the inspired word of God but not everything in it should be taken literally, word for word.” And a steady 15 to 17 percent agree that it’s “an ancient book of fables, legends, history, and moral precepts recorded by men.” Here’s a graph, I put together of these trends, in pdf format.
Why are the results Eugene cites so much higher than the trend data? Unfortunately, the GSS hasn’t been asking this question recently, so it’s hard to say. There are two main possibilities: First, there really has been a very sharp rise in Biblical Literalism since 1998. Second, reponse patterns may be sensitive to the specificity of the question. People might be more likely to accept the literal truth of the best-known Bible events than to believe the whole thing. This is consistent with the way the GSS frames their question, as the “Inspired word” answer allows for the possibility that some things in the Bible are literally true. So we should expect more believers to switch over to literalism for the really big, important events (e.g., the creation of the Universe).
The second theory explains the very large gap in professed literalism between the specific questions about Bible stories and the general question about the whole book. But there’s also evidence for the first interpretation. In a different poll, conducted in September 2003 and also cited on the Polling Report page about religion, respondents were asked a variant of the GSS question. 42 percent said “the actual word of God”, 37 percent said “Not all to be taken literally”, 14 percent said “Written by Men” and 6 percent said they didn’t know. Data for this poll go back to 2001 and have a roughly similar 42/36 split between literalists and inspirationalists. If there’s no response bias from the wording, and this poll is comparable with the GSS data, then literalism seems to have had a resurgence since 1998 and is back to — and perhaps beyond — levels last reported in 1987. The overall proportion of Americans who don’t doubt the Bible has something to do with God has remained steady across the period at about 80 percent.
It’s hard to say more with just this data. On the face of it, the commitment to literal belief in the Bible is a big step up from saying that it’s not all to be taken as, um, Gospel. So it’s surprising to see people heading back up the hill of belief, if you like. But we should be wary about interpreting survey questions about religion in a purely propositional manner — i.e. simply as belief statements or theses in the philosophical sense. Such statements can also be tags used to express affiliation to social and political groups and might be sensitive to the political and cultural climate.But the apparent upward trend is interesting nevertheless.
Daniel’s unfortunate comparison of the great David Icke with the dull and ordinary Yusuf Islam has ignited a bit of irritation from commenters. But Yusuf’s defenders are out-of-date about his doings. Contrary to popular belief he now does allow his old records to be released, donating the proceeds to a variety of charities (including the September 11th fund). I can’t find documentary evidence, but I have heard him retract his support for the Fatwah on Rushdie, and do so in an embarrassed and genuinely apologetic way. Perhaps more importantly, as a leading and respected voice within Islam in the UK he has, since September 11th, put his cards unambiguously on the table as an uncompromising opponent of terrorism, Islamic or otherwise, and is a leading voice for a modern, tolerant, Islam.
In this interview with Bob Harris (recorded before Sept 11th, and which, I now see, you can’t actually hear on the site) he comes across as a modest man who has had a lot of demons to conquer, and has sort of sorted his life out.
I post this just to update people, not to criticise Daniel. I certainly didn’t think the comparison was Islamophobic, just inapt. But the problem is that comparing Icke with just about anybody is inapt! I just thought he deserved to have people know what he’s up to.
For a few years in graduate school I wrote a regular column for the Daily Princetonian, Princeton’s main student newspaper. I got into a bit of trouble once or twice over it, notably for a piece I wrote out of irritation with the local chapter of the Campus Crusade for Christ.
I was reminded of this when I learned, via Billmon, of the strong Christian beliefs of General Counsel Mary Walker. She led the legal team that wrote the recently leaked memo arguing that there were no legal considerations, domestic or foreign, that prevented the President from authorizing torture. She is also a co-founded of the Professional Women’s Fellowship, an offshoot of the CCC. Philip Carter at Intel Dump has described the memo as ‘a cookbook approach for illegal government conduct’. Here is Walker in an interview about her beliefs, followed by a snippet of her report:
Walker: “Making moral decisions in the workplace where it is easy to go along and get along takes courage. It takes moral strength and courage to say, ‘I’m not going to do this because I don’t think it’s the right thing to do.’”
The report: Officials could escape torture convictions by arguing that they were following superior orders, since such orders “may be inferred to be lawful” and are “disobeyed at the peril of the subordinate.”
With just a little more effort here, we could push through to the world of Jack Lint, the character played by Michael Palin in Brazil.
Update: The Walker interview was yanked from the Professional Women’s Fellowship website, in a Christian act of covering up embarrassing stuff. But Billmon has a copy.
Americans are often shocked when they learn that not only does ‘public school’ mean ‘private school’ in the UK, but also in the UK the state not only funds, but collaborates with religious organisations in running, religious schools. I used to be strongly opposed to this practice, at least in principle, though I have also long thought that Muslim schools should be candidates for funding given that RC and C.of E. schools were funded. I’m still unenthusiastic about the situation, but also have a suspicion that the practice is part of the reason that religion, though powefully present in the public culture, is a less rich source of social division than it is in the US. Alan Carling has very nicely posted my idiosyncratic take on this subject on his website. The piece is written really for a UK audience, but its nice and short, and comments somewhat on the US situation. Although it is scheduled for publication as is I’m very curious about reactions to it and, as usual, take my own tentative views to be evolving objects of critique rather than anything set in stone.
We’re on an Evolutionary Psychology kick here at CT. It seems most of our commenters are more enamored of it than some of our contributors. This is maladaptive for the CT meme, because the realization that we disagree will cause traffic to our site to drop. Unless it’s actually adaptive, because the disagreement means traffic to our site will rise. While we’re on the topic, I mean meme, I want to know how my 12-week-old daughter’s emerging desire to put everything that comes her way into her mouth is either evolutionarily adaptive or individually rational. I’ve also spent the day variously exposed to something else realist-types tend to explain, according to taste, as a matter of adaptive fitness or rational choice, namely religion.1
I’m in South Carolina at the moment, and this morning I listened to a lot of radio programming from a station broadcasting Baptist preachers from Easley and Pickens. It was interesting, because as this form of preaching goes it was pretty bad. The highly conventionalized rhetoric of the preaching — marking pauses with “Amen,” namechecking brothers and sisters in the congregation, working through the verses — had little of the intensely musical quality it’s capable of. Instead it served as filler while the Preacher figured out where the next sentence was going. The guy I listened to was working on an extended metaphor about loving your enemies, in particular those people who honk at you from their fancy trucks on the local highways even though you’re only going a few miles below the speed limit of 45 and that’s only because you’re on the phone. But then he segued into a whole piece about how when he was a boy his parents, gathered up now by the Lord God Almighty, Amen, had always told him to respect the Preacher, there was never any talk about how the Preacher ain’t no good, and how can you expect the Preacher to win your children over to Christ when you go home on a Sunday and have the Preacher for dinner? Or lunch? Why I imagine some of you even have him for breakfast, Amen. How can this church grow and prosper — and I tell you that it will grow and prosper, and you may grow and prosper with it and the Lord God Jesus Christ, I know you will come with me, Brother Ray — when people are spreading rumors about the Preacher? How many of you are here — I ask you how many of you are here just to honk your horns today?
The rumor — whatever it was — tended to keep the Preacher’s mind off of the verse, and he kept drifting back to it until his time on air ran out. Later, in a more professional but less satisfying production, CNN addressed The Mystery of Jesus. The main problem with it was the escape-hatch issue that plagues religious documentaries. (Or rather, documentaries about Christianity.) The biblical scholars, historians and archaeologists were on screen for next to no time. Just enough to suggest that there’s a large body of fairly well-established knowledge about the historical Jesus and the creation of the Gospels, but not enough time to actually get much of that information across and help, you know, address the mystery rather than enhance it. Instead, “science” was wheeled out to answer questions like “What did Jesus actually look like?” (Answer: probably not like someone raised on brie in Stockholm) and “What would the medical cause of death by crucifixion really have been?”
My third bit of religion today came via South Park’s Passion of the Jew, which I hadn’t seen before. It offered a pretty balanced take on Mel Gibson’s The Passion, not to mention the broader theological and social dimensions of the film as a cultural phenomenon. I found Cartman’s ability to organize the unwitting townspeople into a neofascist lynch mob particularly convincing, together with the analysis of Gibson’s psychological motivations. At least in the cartoon version, even Steven Pinker would have find it hard to construe them as adaptive. Or rational.
1 Judging by the abstract, that first article seems to rediscover Tylor’s animistic theory of religion.
Before I argue that the Borda voting system is fatally defective, it may be worth considering what kinds of weaknesses could justify such a verdict. We know from Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem that any nontrivial voting system will encourage strategic/insincere voting in some circumstances and will not always elect the right candidate (unless ‘right’ is defined to coincide with the outcome of the voting system in question). So a fatal defect must be a lot worse than this. I claim that the Borda voting system is so vulnerable to strategic manipulation that it would be completely unworkable, provided only that there are no restrictions on candidacy.
Note: I did a Google before writing this and couldn’t find anything similar, but of course, when I checked again after doing the work, I found this almost perfect anticipation of my counter-example. But having done the work, I thought I’d post it anyway.
My argument can be illustrated with a simple example. Suppose that an election is to be held to fill an office, and that the population is divided into two groups, say Blue and Red. All Blue voters would prefer, of all possible candidates, that B1 fills the job, and all Red voters would prefer, of all possible candidates, that R1 fills the job. There are 60 Red voters and 40 Blue voters. In most systems of voting, R1 is guaranteed to win, no matter what other candidates run and whether or not voters act strategically.
Now consider Borda, and suppose that in addition to R1 and B1, the Blues advance a second candidate, B21, who is a little less attractive to all voters than B1. Assuming sincere voting, the Blues will all vote B1, B2, R1 and the Reds will all vote R1,B1, B2. The result will be that B1 gets 240 Borda votes, B2 gets 140 and R1 gets 220, so that B1 is elected.
Even with strategic voting, the Blues still benefit from this strategy provided they can either formally or informally caucus. The Reds’ best strategy is to split their preferences between the two Blue candidates. The Blues’ best response is a mixed strategy, in which, with 50 per cent probability they all vote for B1 and with 50 per cent probability they all vote for B2. With an initial 60-40 split, R1 beats the top Blue candidate 220 to 210. But if the initial split is a bit closer, say 54-46, the Blues win.
The only effective way for the Reds to respond is to run a second candidate of their own, restoring the initial balance in their favor. But then the Blues can put up a third candidate and the process goes on indefinitely. Hence the only way to get a workable election is to restrict the right of candidacy, in which case the restriction procedure effectively amounts to a first round of voting.
1 Note for Australian readers. Are you thinking what I’m thinking?
IRV has serious problems. It allows a sufficiently small minority of voters to safely register “protest” votes for minor-party candidates—but only as long as their candidate is sure to lose. As soon as their candidate threatens to actually win, they risk hurting their own cause by ranking their favorite first, just as they do under our current plurality system. IRV is therefore unlikely to be any more successful than plurality at solving the classic “lesser of two evils” problem.It’s straightforward to show, however, that this problem can only arise if your preferred candidate would be the loser in a Condorcet system. Hence, voting strategically yields the preferred Condorcet outcome.
To see how the argument works consider three candidates A,B,C and suppose that A’s supporters rank ABC, C’s supporters rank CBA, and that no candidate has an absolute majority. Then (regardless of the preferences of B’s supporters), B is the Condorcet winner. If B has the most or second-best supporters, then a (weakly) dominant strategy is for everyone to vote in line with their preferences, leading to B’s election. Suppose however that B has the smallest number of first-preference supporters and that A would win over C in a pairwise contest. Then, as stated in the critique above, the optimal choice for C’s supporters is to vote strategically for B, so that B finishes the first round ahead of C. The distribution of preferences then ensures that B is the winner. So, in this case, strategic voting does not produce the “lesser evil” as far as the majority of the electorate is concerned.
Things can tricker when there are n (greater than 3) candidates with a serious chance of winning. But the problems for Condorcet are even worse, since the method requires n(n-1) pairwise comparisons.
Taking this a bit further it seems likely that, whatever rule is chosen for resolving cycles, an implementable Condorcet system would be vulnerable to exploitation by strategic choices to run (or not run) particular candidates whose function would be to tip the balance in favor of some other candidate.
Eric Maskin and Partha Dasgupta are smart guys, and its hard to believe they are totally ignorant of what happens in the Southern Hemisphere. So how can they justify writing a piece promoting a system of rank-order voting as superior to the existing American (plurality) and French (top-two runoff) systems, without mentioning that Australia has had this system (in a range of variants) for many decades.1
A minor side point is that, in addition to having the world’s most complicated voting systems, Australia also has compulsory voting.2 Typically more than 95 per cent of votes are formal, that is, list all candidates in order of preference, with no missing numbers or repetitions. In Dennis Mueller’s generally excellent book on Public Choice, he discusses the single transferable vote and suggests that, while attractive in theory, it’s too complicated to work in practice. Either Australians are a lot smarter than everybody else, or public choice theorists aren’t as smart as they think they are.
1 To be precise, Maskin and Dasgupta advocate the Borda weighted vote, whereas Australia has the single transferable vote (called preferential voting in Australia), but nothing in their argument distingushes the two.
2 More precisely, compulsory registration and attendance at the polling station - there’s nothing to stop you casting a blank ballot.
I recently read Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morality with a group of colleagues. To the extent to which I understood the book (and despite the book’s brevity I’m feeling somewhat sympathetic to those snakes who have to sit around whilst they digest a large mammal), my comprehension was greatly assisted by Brian Leiter’s excellent Nietzsche on Morality . Reading the reviews and commentary on Mel Gibson’s Passion, I was immediately reminded of a passage from the second essay, where Nietzsche is writing about the genesis of guilt from the sense of indebtedness (at first to ancestors) and remarks on the further excruciating twist that Christianity brings: on the pretext of having their debts forgiven, believers are put in a postition of psychological indebtedness from which they can never recover (He sent his only son, and we killed Him):
…. we confront the paradoxical and horrifying expedient with which a martyred humanity found temporary relief, that stroke of genius of Christianity—God’s sacrifice of himself for the guilt of human beings, God paying himself back with himself, God as the only one who can redeem man from what for human beings has become impossible to redeem—the creditor sacrifices himself for the debtor, out of love (can people believe that?), out of love for his debtor! (sec. 21)
I haven’t seen Gibson’s film yet (since it doesn’t open in the UK for another month) but it is clear from the reviews that it is precisely this aspect of the Christian story that Gibson accentuates through his relentless focus on the torture and suffering of Jesus. (And see the email of the day on Andrew Sullivan for evidence that some believers are taking the movie in exactly this way.)
Contrast this with, say, Pasolini’s treatment of the story in his The Gospel According to St. Matthew , where another aspect of the Christian message is emphasised: that we all belong to a common humanity, that each person has moral worth and should be recognised as such, and that compassion is an appropriate attitude to the suffering of our fellow humans (a vision powerfully expressed, also, in Joan Osborne’s song “One of Us”). Nietzsche doesn’t like this aspect of Christianity either, of course, but for me at least, it is the most attractive feature of the religion. Not just attractive, of course, but morally and politically important and influential: the basic equality of humans posited by both Locke and Kant is strongly rooted in this Christian tradition (which poses an unresolved problem, I think, for those of us who want to hang onto that moral idea whilst rejecting religion - c.f Jeremy Waldron’s recent God, Locke and Equality ).
One of the reasons I can’t bring myself to share the antipathy to religion that is expressed by someone like our esteemed regular commenter Ophelia Benson , is that, at its best, religion succeeds in a symbolic articulation of universal moral concern that secular morality finds it hard to match up to (motivationally, I mean). Secular morality is a thin gruel compared to the notion that, as children of God, we are to think of ourselves as brothers and sisters. It sounds as if Gibson’s film is a reminder not of religion at its best, but at its very worst: cruel and sadistic and aiming to provoke a mixture of guilt, worthlessness and rage in believers. I’m keeping an open mind about whether the film is specifically anti-semitic, but it sounds very much as if the film draws on and inflames the very reactive attitudes that have inspired much religious violence and persecution (not to speak of personal unhappiness) in the past.
Valdis Krebs presents this map of purchasing habits for political books, using the techniques of cluster analysis.
Krebs’ main point is that the books divide readers into two sharply separate clusters, color-coded on the assumption that one group of readers are Democrats and the other are Republicans. The diagram also coincides with the standard left-right coding.
I have a couple of observations on this. The first is the trivial one that this color-coding is the exact opposite of the one that would naturally be used in Australia or the UK (back in my days as a folksinger, one of my more successful pieces (this is a highly relative term) was about a Labour leader who “went in [to office] Red and came out Blue”.) Without wanting to load too much on to arbitrary signifiers, this does seem to me to support my view that there’s a bigger gulf between liberals and the radical left in the US than elsewhere. Even if the mainstream left party in other countries does not adopt the red banner of Marxism there’s sufficient continuity along the political spectrum to make it’s adoption by the right unlikely.
The second thing that’s striking is that, on the left-right orientation, I come out as a centrist. I’ve read nearly all the blue books that are within one or two links of the red zone, and none of those on the far left of the diagram. On the right, I’ve read only Letters to a Young Conservative .
Looking again at the titles of the books I’ve read, while there’s a vaguely leftish slant to them, one could scarcely call either Clash of Civilisations or Elusive Quest for Growth supportive of the left. The striking thing is that these are mostly the serious books, while those on either side are mostly lightweight polemics1 (I’m inferring this from the reviews I’ve read of some of them and the titles of the others). But it would appear from the cluster analysis that those who read leftwing partisan diatribes also tend to read serious books (and vice versa) while those who read rightwing partisan diatribes don’t read anything else.
In terms of the debate that’s been going on for some time about the relative intellectual capacity of the left and the right, the cluster analysis seems to imply that the left is doing a lot more to enhance its intellectual capacity than is the right.
(Hat tip to Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution)
1 On rereading this makes me sound dreadfully highminded. In fact, I regularly read, and occasionally write lightweigh partisan polemics. But the targets are more likely to be obscure Australian politicians and pundits than the great and powerful of the world.
The notion that Jews are collectively responsible for the death of Christ may seem too silly for words, but it is obviously still taken seriously enough to require refutation, not surprisingly in view of the immense human suffering it has caused. My question is, has anyone ever suggested that Italians1 are collectively responsible?
I know from experience that irony is too dangerous for use in blogs. So, at the risk of boring 95 per cent of readers, let me be absolutely clear on my own position. I don’t think anyone now living can properly be blamed or praised for the actions of putative ancestors 2000 years ago - the point of the post is that a position that would rightly be regarded as ludicrous in relation to Italians is still taken seriously in relation to Jews. I also don’t believe we have, or are ever likely to obtain, sufficient evidence to attribute responsibility for the death of Jesus to any person or group.
1 To answer the obvious quibble, the term “Roman” referred, at the time in question, to any (free) inhabitant of Italy (Roman citizenship was extended to the whole of Italy in 89BC), and Pontius Pilate himself was of Samnite rather than specifically Roman origin.
Kevin Drum is surprised to learn that schools in Britain offer religious education classes. (Ireland is the same, by the way.) He comments that “I don’t think there’s anything unconstitutional about teaching a “History of Religion” class or something like it in an American high school, but it just wouldn’t happen. And then a proposal to add atheism as one of the highlighted religions? Kaboom!”
I’ve wondered before about this, in part because of a course in Classical Social Theory that I teach. I usually take a detour for a lecture before we read some Max Weber, because a chunk of the class (upper-level undergraduates) will have no clear idea what the Reformation was. This surprised me when it first happened, but now I anticipate it. Last year I got a very nice evaluation from an evangelical Protestant student saying, in part, “Thanks for respecting my views and for all the information about where Protestantism came from! I never knew that!” She would wear “Jesus Loves You” t-shirts to class and really livened up our discussions about Durkheim.
Scott Martens at a Fistful of Euros has some useful thoughts on the passing of the anti-headscarf law by the French National Assembly. See also Chris Brooke on this. Chris is pessimistic about the law being struck down by the Conseil d’Etat but its record hitherto on this issue has been quite liberal and tolerant — so I’m not so sure.
I’ve been following a debate that’s been going on (and off) at Butterflies and Wheels over the past few weeks and wondering about a move that my fellow atheist Ophelia Benson makes there. Ophelia quotes Michael Ruse thus:
People like Dawkins, and the Creationists for that matter, make a mistake about the purposes of science and religion. Science tries to tell us about the physical world and how it works. Religion aims at giving a meaning to the world and to our place in it. Science asks immediate questions. Religion asks ultimate questions. There is no conflict here, except when people mistakenly think that questions from one domain demand answers from the other. Science and religion, evolution and Christianity, need not conflict, but only if each knows its place in human affairs — and stays within these boundaries.
To which she replies:
That certainly is a popular argument, or rather assertion, these days, isn’t it. But it isn’t true. Religion does try to tell us about the world - it tells us there’s a supernatural being in charge of it. That is a truth-claim. Religious people do in fact believe in the existence - the real existence, not some fuzzy metaphoric existence - of this supernatural being.
Now this is all way outside my area, but something seems wrong about Ophelia’s reply here. Religions sometimes do make truth-claims (Jesus was crucified and rose from the dead, for example), and to that extent Ruse’s point is weak and Ophelia is right. But if there is a supreme being then that fact doesn’t look to me like an empirical truth about the world, of the kind that is within the domain of science. If such a being exists, then presumably he, she or it exists necessarily, whereas the subject matter of the physical sciences is the contingent features of the world. (And insofar as she, he or it causes the world to exist then she, he or it is something external to and not a part of the world.)
Not that any of that gets the conventionally religious what they want. It is, after all, consistent with conceiving of the creative being as a demiurge.
Via David Appell, I came across this marvellous quote from Freeman Dyson
In desperation I asked Fermi whether he was not impressed by the agreement between our calculated numbers and his measured numbers. He replied, "How many arbitrary parameters did you use for your calculations?" I thought for a moment about our cut-off procedures and said, "Four." He said, "I remember my friend Johnny von Neumann used to say, with four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk."It came to mind when I read this story in the NYT with the introductory claim What really stimulates economic growth is whether you believe in an afterlife — especially hell.The report is of some estimations done by Rachel M. McCleary and Robert J. Barro (the story notes that the two are married) published in American Sociological Review.
Barro is probably the biggest name in the field of cross-country growth regressions (a field in which I've also dabbled), and I'm sure he's aware that thousands of these regressions have been run and that, with very limited exceptions, results that particular factors are conducive to growth have proved highly fragile. I haven't read the paper, so for all I know, the results have been checked for robustness in every possible way. But my eyebrows went up when I saw this para
Oddly enough, the research also showed that at a certain point, increases in church, mosque and synagogue attendance tended to depress economic growth. Mr. Barro, a renowned economist, and Ms. McCleary, a lecturer in Harvard's government department, theorized that larger attendance figures could mean that religious institutions were using up a disproportionate share of resources.What this means is that at least two parameters have been used in fitting growth to religiosity and that the two have opposite signs - most likely it's some sort of quadratic. In my experience, there's always at least one arbitrary choice made in the pretesting of these models (for example once you have a quadratic, the scaling of variables becomes critical). That gives three free parameters, if not more.
I'm no John von Neumann, but with two parameters I can fit a dromedary and with three I can do a Bactrian camel.
The BBC reports that the French government’s proposed ban on the Islamic headscarf and other symbols of religious adherence in schools has upset the 15,000 Sikhs who live in and around Paris. If they insist on wearing the turban they risk being denied access to education. Even with the law merely a proposal, Sikhs are already being refused admission to institutions of higher education.
I see that Chris Brooke is guest-blogging over at a Fistful of Euros. He’s sure to say much of interest at what is becoming one of the best blogs around. His first post there alerted me to something I’d missed, namely Scott Martens’s excellent exposition of Marx’s On The Jewish Question (in comments - you have to scroll down), which connects with some of the issues discussed in my post below about Clermont-Tonnerre and the 1789 debates about the rights of man in the French National Assembly.
Norman Geras has a post on anti-semitism in France which documents some awful recent attacks on Jews. But he then goes on to cite another article by Serge Klarsfeld which alleges that France has been a “consistent adversary of the Jewish nation” and cites a 1789 speech to the National Assembly by Clermont-Tonnerre, one of the deputies. I was curious about this and googled for it, and the whole speech is available on-line . The speech actually concerns the various groups who were excluded from various legal rights before the revolution, including members of “questionable professions” (such as actors and executioners) and religious minorities including Protestants and Jews. Clermont-Tonnerre is arguing for the extension of legal rights to all citizens, regardless of their religious opinion, and that no-one should have a special and distinct legal status because of the religious or ethnic identity: all individuals should be equal as citizens before the law. He attacks the idea that the Jews should be allowed to have their own judges and to exact their own punishments on lawbreakers. But it is clear that the point he is making is the same as a liberal would make now if it were proposed that Muslims should be allowed to establish Sharia courts with the power to enact punishments within France or Britain today. Maybe there is an argument supporting the thesis of a persistent anti-Jewish bias by the French state since the revolution, but the broadly liberal sentiments expressed by Clermont-Tonnerre in the National Assembly are no evidence for this.
Those following recent French debates about the proposal that the ostentatious display of religious symbols in schools should be banned, may find this article from Le Nouvel Observateur by sociologists Jocelyne Césari et Jean Baubérot enlightening. As they point out, French law is actually rather close to the liberal view of these matters. But there is a mismatch between what French law requires — as reflected in successive decisions of the Conseil D’Etat — and a commonly held view of the principle of secularism which charges the state with the aggressive promotion of Enlightenment rationalism. It all seems a little odd from this side of the English Channel. I had a conversation with a French researcher last year who declared herself shocked to have seen a newsreader on the BBC wearing a small crucifix round her neck. I had to say that I’d never noticed such a thing, wouldn’t have cared if I had, and that I’m sure that most British people wouldn’t notice: in a country with an established church hardly anyone cares about religion.
One oddity of the French media’s representation of this issue: the controversy centres on the common Islamic practice of women covering their hair with a headscarf. Of course, in some Islamic societies rather more is covered: women are veiled or enclosed in outfits like the burqua. The French secularists object to schoolgirls wearing headscarves that cover their hair — and the word “foulard” is appropriate here — but often the press reports refer to the “voile” and sometimes this is absurd. So the the caption to photograph accompanying this article (again from the Nouvel Obs) reads “Lors de la manifestation des femmes voilées” but the women in the picture are not veiled.
I got an email this morning with some photos of the crowd waiting for the Winter solstice sunrise at Newgrange. I think Newgrange is one of the wonders of the world, so here’s a post of mine about it from this time last year.
Newgrange is a megalithic tomb in County Meath’s Boyne Valley, in Ireland. It is more than five thousand years old. Built around 3200BC, it is five hundred years older than the Great Pyramid of Giza and about a thousand years older than Stonehenge. When it was rediscovered in 1699, it looked like an ordinary hill. It was properly excavated beginning in 1962, when archaeologists thought it was a particularly fine example of a passage grave, but nothing more. Then, Prof. M.J. O‘Kelly of U.C.C. discovered the roof box, a small opening in the hill above the passage entrance, which led to a shaft that ran to the chamber at the center of the tomb. He had an idea about what it might be for. On the morning of December 21st 1967, O’Kelly sat in the central chamber and, as the sun came up, saw the first rays of the rising sun run down the shaft and strike the floor of the chamber.
Newgrange is a clock. The shaft leading out to the roof box is precisely aligned so that on the morning of the Winter Solstice the first light of day will run directly into the middle of the tomb. Or, at least, it was precisely so aligned. It is so old that changes in the Earth’s orbit have affected its operation. When it was built, the sun would have struck the back wall of the chamber, rather than the floor, and the light would have remained in the chamber for about four minutes longer than it does now. It was very accurate. The people who built Newgrange knew what they were doing.
A society — a civilization, if you like — is a hard thing to hold together. If you live in an agrarian society, as the overwhelming majority of people did until about two hundred years ago, and you are on the western edge of Europe, few times are harder than the dead of Winter. The days are at their shortest, the sun is far away, and the Malthusian edge, in Brad DeLong’s phrase, is right in front of you. It’s no wonder so many religious festivals take place around the solstice. Here were a people, more than five millennia ago, able not only to pull through the Winter successfully, but able also to build a huge timepiece to remind themselves that they were going to make it. It’s astonishing.
Patrick Belton at OxBlog disapproves of the “Pope Death Watch” but can’t resist linking to the betting on JPII’s successor, together with an analysis of the contenders. The main candidates are an Italian, a Cuban and a Nigerian, which sounds like the beginning of a pretty bad joke, the punchline to which is left as an exercise for the reader. I want the Nigerian to win, mainly because of the expanded possibilities for spam:
REQUEST FOR ASSISTANCE — STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL.
Dear Sir, I pray this important message meets you in peace, may blessings of God be upon you and your family and grant you the wisdom to understand my situation and how much I really need your assistance. Before I start let me introduce myself, my name is FRANCIS ARINZE, Cardinal of the most holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, former President of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue and prefect of divine worship and discipline of sacraments. I have recently been elected Pontiff of the Universal Church by the conclave of cardinals, which you may have seen on the news.
Upon accession to my office I found that the spiritual finances of the church were in a difficult position dues to the activities of certain members of my predecessor’s staff. Budgetary measures undertaken by an American auditor have rectified the account sheet, but in the process they were forced to temporarily suspend the decision of St Pius V banning financial transactions in indulgences.
As you are a learned person, you will no doubt be aware that the Treasury of the Church constitutes an inexhaustible fund which, via standard open-market operations, was easily sufficient to remit the debt. Due to the unexpected intervention of St Anthony, however, we also turned up three large trunks filled with devotional medals, last seen during the later years of the reign of Boniface VIII. Each of these medals is enriched with a perpetual apostolic indulgence good for the extra-sacramental remission, a culpa et a poena, of temporal punishment due to one (1) mortal or ten (10) venal sin(s), and valued at approximately $125 million at prevailing exchange rates.
These trunks are located in vaults of a security company in The Netherlands (Holland). I was contacted in a letter dated 12th of September by the security company asking me to indicate if I was in receipt of the letter as a sign that I am living and still subscribed for their service.
I am interested in using a small fraction of this money, much less than
one percent for a re- organization of the work of God, plus some necessary payments to certain litigants in the United States, but I do not need the rest and do not want to have any direct dealing with it. But I need someone who will be able to use the fund better maybe for charity or something universally profitable. I have thought of doing it myself but, well, I am the Pope and a trip to Holland in the popemobile might be noticed. I will be glad if you have any interest in the direction of maybe managing or transmitting the fund as you prefer in your capacity and understanding.
I will be glad to get a response from you ASAP.
Regards, FRANCIS ARINZE (Pope)
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