Religion

Megan McArdle’s dog, Finnegan, contracted an infection and had to be put to sleep. She posted about it. I thought: soon, some gobshite will show up in the comments, deriding the way she felt at four in the morning the night her dog died. And sure enough. Gotta love the intertubes.

Meanwhile, Jerry Falwell has died, too. In terms of net good brought into the world during their respective lives, Megan’s dog is probably ahead of Falwell. The conjunction of events reminded me of Oliver Goldsmith on morality, dogs and men.
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I can’t resist following Conservapedia, the Tlön version of Wikipedia, in which the liberal, anti-American bias of the Earth version is replaced with virtue and apple pie. But where did this bias come from, and how is it so deeply rooted in our culture? The answer, it turns out is the Bible, not of course the true version held in the vaults of Uqbar, but the liberal Earth Bible known by such as names as the King James Version.

In the Uqbar version, as explained at Conservapedia, all sorts of politically correct liberalism is eliminated or glossed out of existence. Uqbar scholars have discovered that the soft-on-crime John 8:7 ‘”If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone” was inserted by time-travelling liberals some time around the 4th century. Naturally, Conservapedia says, Wikipedia sticks to the Earth version, though a check of the actual site suggests that the annoying liberal habit of looking at all the evidence is at work here as well.

Conservapedia has able assistance from other conservative sources. All that class warfare stuff about the rich not getting into heaven (Matthew 19:21-24) turns out to mean that if you want money, you should cut God (or his earthly representatives) a good share in advance. Other kinds of warfare are fine with the Prince of Peace, though. As for turning the other cheek ((Luke 6:27-31), it’s No More Christian Nice Guy.

Home sales are down a long ways. But why?

Sales of existing homes *plunged in March by the largest amount in nearly two decades*, reflecting *bad weather* and increasing problems in the subprime mortgage market, a real estate trade group reported today. … David Lereah, chief economist at the Realtors, attributed the big drop in part to *bad weather in February*, which *discouraged shoppers* and meant that sales that closed in March would be lower. … There was weakness in every part of the country in March. Sales fell by 10.9 percent in the Midwest. They were down 9.1 percent in the West, 8.2 percent in the Northeast and 6.2 percent in the South.

Clearly, the 9.1 percent sales drop in the West is directly attributable to the weather. Here in Arizona, it’s been a brutal mid-70s and sunny for about two months now. I can’t speak to the devastating effects of the moderate early morning shower we had last Saturday here in Tucson, though. The fact that the drop in the West was one percentage point larger than the drop in the Northeast is also obviously weather-related. The guys who get quoted in reports like this should just own up and change their job title from “Chief Economist” to “Chief Shaman for Rationalizing the Juju.”

Another bloggingheads.tv with Will Wilkinson is up; among other things we talk about bad culturalist arguments and my sad yet inexorable decline into Goldberg Derangement Syndrome. I suggest that overly determinist cultural arguments aren’t very convincing, especially when they try to explain gross differences between societies. Good cultural explanations need to identify the specific mechanisms that make for cultural stability and change. Coincidentally, I was involved in discussion today over an interesting-sounding new piece from Steve Pfaff, an University of Washington sociologist, forthcoming in Jeff Kopstein and Sven Steinmo’s new volume on divergence between the EU and US. It’s notorious that far fewer Europeans report going to church than Americans – this is often presented, especially in the pop-lit, as evidence of profound and lasting cultural divergence between the two. There’s good sociological reason to suggest that it is nothing of the sort – a key causal factor is the degree of marketplace competition.

In many European countries, churches are established and have official state support, so that they don’t have enormous need to tout for churchgoers. They’re monopolists, and as Albert Hirschman suggests, monopolists tend to be lazy. In the US, in contrast, the legal institution of church-state separation means that churches have to tout actively for business, often through means that appear crassly commercial to Europeans (megachurches and the like). Because they’ll disappear if they don’t attract adherents, they have good incentive to succeed rather better than their European counterparts in putting bums on seats. Apparently, there is a striking negative correlation between church establishment and church attendance across West European countries. Now this presumably isn’t the only causal factor – but it is an important one – and one which suggests that an apparently gross cultural divergence between the US and Europe is to a large extent rooted in the quite particular institutions governing church-state relations (you could perhaps claim that these institutions are themselves manifestations of broad cultural differences, but this would be to miss out on the quite specific historical reasons why they came into being).

Tyler Cowen asks,

bq. So why *are* women more religious than men? Is it just greater risk-aversion?

According to my colleague Louise Roth, in an article from the current ASR co-authored with Jeff Kroll, the answer to the second question is, “No.” Here’s the abstract:

bq. Scholars of religion have long known that women are more religious than men, but they disagree about the reasons underlying this difference. Risk preference theory suggests that gender gaps in religiosity are a consequence of men’s greater propensity to take risks, and that irreligiosity is analogous to other high-risk behaviors typically associated with young men. Yet, research using risk preference theory has not effectively distinguished those who perceive a risk to irreligiousness from those who do not. In this article, we evaluate risk preference theory. We differentiate those who believe in an afterlife, who perceive a risk to irreligiousness, from nonbelievers who perceive no risk associated with the judgment after death. Using General Social Survey and World Values Survey data, multivariate models test the effects of gender and belief on religiousness. In most religions and nations the gender gap is larger for those who do not believe in an afterlife than for those who do, contradicting the predictions of risk preference theory. The results clearly demonstrate that the risk preference thesis is not a compelling explanation of women’s greater average religiosity.

Russell has a long, and typically thoughtful, piece explaining his attitude both to abortion and to regulation of abortion. A teaser:

I’ve probably called myself “pro-life” in the past, maybe way back when I was in high school or an undergraduate. But I have no specific memory of doing so, and I wouldn’t today. Part of this is, simply, because I’m not the hardline, simplistic, killing-a-fetus-is-murder opponent of abortion that I was raised to be. (Reading The Cider House Rules will do that to a person.) Do I still want to deter abortion, including–but not limited to–limiting abortion rights where I think best? Yes, definitely; the revulsion I feel towards the concept is still there. When I first learned about what an “abortion” was as a child, the mental image in my (ten-year-old, perhaps?) mind was of that of doctor wielding a butcher knife, stabbing a baby within a mother’s womb…and frankly, the straightforward medical facts of what an abortion involves don’t lead me to feel that that disturbing image is in any principled way flawed.

But while I would insist that is both impossible and irresponsible to pretend that such sentiments and feelings either could or should be excluded from political discussions, I also acknowledge that you have to be able to at least provide some reasoned account of the roots and parameters of one’s revulsions for political purposes; standing alone, they provide few details and fewer answers.

Go read it, and comment there.

One of the questions — about a long-lived Biblical character — suggests the quiz author believes (amongst other things) in the existence of someone called “Strom Thurman.” It suggests a striking mental image, certainly. Via PZ Myers, who naturally also got an A.

_Update_: On the basis of the comments (and, to be honest, the questions), I think it’s fair to say that this post should probably be titled, “The Many Benefits of Taking Absurdly Easy Tests.”

I’ve just finished reading Philip Kitcher’s new book Living With Darwin (UK). It is fantastic. He provides a careful but completely accessible defense of Darwin’s ideas about evolution, against the defenders of Intelligent Design theory. He also agrees with religious opponents of evolutionary theory that it is a genuine threat to a certain kind of religious belief. He calls this “providentialist” belief, on which “the universe was created by a Being who has a great design, a Being who cares for his creatures, who observes the fall of every sparrow and is especially concerned for humanity”. Darwin really is a threat to their beliefs and, in a nice observation that he attributes to Christopher Peacock, Darwin is probably singled out because he is the only threat whose views get encountered in a systematic way by anyone who does not get an elite college education in the humanities (in the US especially). Voltaire, Hume, Kant, all might be seen as worse threats if anyone knew who they were.

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Rod Dreher has converted to Catholicism, then to Orthodoxy, and now to hippie. This is a strange personality type. Nonetheless, well done for the moment, Rod. I’ve always thought that if I were going to bother converting to a religion I’d just go on and be clasped to the bosom of the holy mother Russian church. Why mess around, you know?

Perhaps uncharitable shorter Rod Dreher: “You know, although I’d listened to the Black Sabbath song ‘War Pigs‘ many times before, I felt now as if only now I were hearing it for the first time.”

(With charity towards all, I advise readers to go out and listen to some Sister Rosetta Tharpe. If you’ve never heard her music, it will blow your mind.)

This thing just arrived from the future.What can I say? if this is the RDF, sign me up.

_Update_: If you think _I’m_ a Mac fanboy, check out these photos of the faithful worshipping the holy relic (it’s behind glass, naturally) at the convention. A Durkheimian moment for the brushed-metal set. They look like the apes in _2001_ gazing at the monolith.

What seems to me a very curious story about Christian groups being drummed out of the student union at Exeter University, is reported here and here. Comment from the Archbishop of Cantebury here. It seems that funding has been withheld because they require members to confirm that they are Christians. I suppose this could be reasonable — the student leaders say that they only want to fund groups that are open to anybody. But who wants to join a Christian Union other than Christians? If I remember correctly the Socialist group I belonged to at college was self-financing, but I’ve no idea whether we could have gotten access to funds if we’d wanted to. We’d certainly have resisted being open to Tories…but its not clear why they’d have joined. And the demand that they change their name because it is misleading (apparently the authorities think that “Christian Union” might mislead potential members into thinking that they are joining an ecumenical group of theists, agnostics, and atheists, whereas it seems obvious that the “Church of England Union” would be the moniker for that group) seems completely bizarre. I hereby demand that the Labour and Conservative parties change their names on the same grounds! The Christians are threatening legal action, and although my instinct is that they must surely be in the right, at least as a matter of reasonableness if not actual law, I do wonder if there is something going on here that isn’t being represented in the stories. I found the online student newspaper of the Exeter students, which is not much more illuminating (apart from the fact that it carries an interview with Noel Edmonds, which is revealing about something). Does anyone know what is going on here?

Today is World Aids Day, and UN AIDS reports that another 14.000 children, women and men will become infected with HIV today. This year is 25 years ago that the first case was reported. In those 25 years, there has been a gigantic difference in the impact of HIV/AIDS on the affluent societies versus the poor societies, especially in sub-Saharan African. The life expectancy in some African countries such as Botswana and Swaziland is now well below 35 years. And even these statistics do not reveal the grim reality of children who are growing up without adults, in what social scientists now call ‘childheaded households’. How can a 12 year old girl feed her younger siblings? If there are no neighbours or organisations supporting them, it is likely that her only short-term survival option is prostitution. Long-term survival is something these children simply cannot contemplate.

The theme of this World Aids Day is accountability – not only of individuals who are having unsafe sex (especially those who are infecting others through unwanted sex), but also of religious leaders discouraging the use and promotion of condoms, political leaders of rich societies who don't give enough money to fight the epidemic, and political leaders in severely HIV/AIDS-affected countries, such as Doctor Beetroot, who are misinforming the population. But World Aids Day is also the day when we should thank the many men and women who are fighting this ugly disease, from grassroots awareness activities up to diplomatic action at the highest level, often in difficult circumstances.

I’m a few days late with this, but still wanted to write a short post about the total ban on abortion in Nicaragua. Abortion is now a criminal act under _all_ circumstances, including when the life of the mother is in danger, or when the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest. There was not a single member of the Nicaraguan parliament who voted against the proposal, which has been explained by the fact that there are elections coming up soon, and no political party wanted to allienate the Catholic voters.
From a moral point of view, abortion is a very difficult issue for most people — also for the non-religious. But how can one vote for legislation that forces women to give birth to a baby that is the result of rape or incest? Surely those parliamentarians must not have the faintest idea of what rape and incest does to the life of a girl or a woman. And even worse, how can one take responsibility for legally forcing women to continue a pregnancy if it is likely that both the mother and the foetus will die?
Moreover, from a pragmatic/political point of view it’s clear what will happen. Girls and women from rich families will go to Cuba (where abortion is legal), and those from poorer families will have illegal (read: unsafe) abortions. The best road to minimising the number of abortions is not to criminalise them, but rather to acknowledge that, whatever degree of (religious) moralising, most people will have sex anyway; to make contraceptives available; and to support women who are faced with an unwanted pregnancy so that they have effective choices between different options, and that, if they choose for abortion, they will have it as early as possible in the pregnancy and under safe circumstances. And let’s hope that no other countries follow this irresponsible move by the Nicaraguan parliament.

Via Dave Weeden, the latest moneyspinner to emerge from the muppet labs at Scientology HQ in Clearwater, FL:

Under wraps for decades, Super Power now is being prepped for its eventual rollout in Scientology’s massive building in downtown Clearwater. … A key aim of Super Power is to enhance one’s perceptions – and not just the five senses we all know – hearing, sight, touch, taste and smell. Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard taught that people have 57 “perceptics.” … Hubbard promised Super Power would improve perceptions and “put the person into a new realm of ability.”

How much would you pay to receive this marvellous training? Five thousand dollars? Ten thousand? Don’t answer yet! There’s more. The 57 Perceptics (not a brand of tomato sauce or an unsuccessful doo-wop outfit) include Timen Sight [sic], Tasten Colorn Depth [sic], and Personal Size [if you know what I mean].

Asked about Super Power, church spokesman Ben Shaw provided a written statement: “Super Power is a series of spiritual counseling processes designed to give a person back his own viewpoint, increase his perception, exercise his power of choice, and greatly enhance other spiritual abilities.” Shaw would not say how much the program will cost. Upper levels of Scientology training can run tens of thousands of dollars. He declined to provide further insight into Super Power. “It’s not something I’m willing to provide to you in any manner,” Shaw said.

Comic Book Guy Alert! No information will be imparted to you whatsoever until you answer me these questions three, and also sign over the deeds to your house.

Super Power takes “weeks, not months” to complete, said Feshbach. He would not discuss the specific machines and drills that former Scientologists said are used to enhance perceptions. The perceptics portion of Super Power is one of 12 “rundowns” in the full program … Details of Super Power training have been kept secret even from church members. Like much of Scientology training, details aren’t revealed until one pays to take the course.

Notice the 11 extra rundowns that have just been added to the program, of which Super Power Perceptics is only one! _Now_ how much would you pay? Sign up now! Remember, your very willingness to cough up large amounts of cash for this stuff is evidence that you need professional training to heighten your preceptual awareness of the world and the sort of people who live in it.