Charlie Brown Christmas

Linus explains what Christmas is all about to Charlie Brown

Merry Christmas!

Ernie Johnson's Thoughts on the Presidential Election

"I never know from one election or the next, who's going to be in the Oval Office, but I always know who's on the throne"

Follow the sacredness - Jonathan Haidt

From the New York Times, Jonathan Haidt

"...A good way to follow the sacredness is to listen to the stories that each tribe tells about itself and the larger nation. The Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith once summarized the moral narrative told by the American left like this: “Once upon a time, the vast majority” of people suffered in societies that were “unjust, unhealthy, repressive and oppressive.” These societies were “reprehensible because of their deep-rooted inequality, exploitation and irrational traditionalism — all of which made life very unfair, unpleasant and short. But the noble human aspiration for autonomy, equality and prosperity struggled mightily against the forces of misery and oppression and eventually succeeded in establishing modern, liberal, democratic, capitalist, welfare societies.” Despite our progress, “there is much work to be done to dismantle the powerful vestiges of inequality, exploitation and repression.” This struggle, as Smith put it, “is the one mission truly worth dedicating one’s life to achieving.” 

This is a heroic liberation narrative. For the American left, African-Americans, women and other victimized groups are the sacred objects at the center of the story. As liberals circle around these groups, they bond together and gain a sense of righteous common purpose. 

Contrast that narrative with one that Ronald Reagan developed in the 1970s and ’80s for conservatism. The clinical psychologist Drew Westen summarized the Reagan narrative like this: “Once upon a time, America was a shining beacon. Then liberals came along and erected an enormous federal bureaucracy that handcuffed the invisible hand of the free market. They subverted our traditional American values and opposed God and faith at every step of the way.” For example, “instead of requiring that people work for a living, they siphoned money from hard-working Americans and gave it to Cadillac-driving drug addicts and welfare queens.” Instead of the “traditional American values of family, fidelity and personal responsibility, they preached promiscuity, premarital sex and the gay lifestyle” and instead of “projecting strength to those who would do evil around the world, they cut military budgets, disrespected our soldiers in uniform and burned our flag.” In response, “Americans decided to take their country back from those who sought to undermine it.” 

This, too, is a heroic narrative, but it’s a heroism of defense. In this narrative it’s God and country that are sacred — hence the importance in conservative iconography of the Bible, the flag, the military and the founding fathers. But the subtext in this narrative is about moral order. For social conservatives, religion and the traditional family are so important in part because they foster self-control, create moral order and fend off chaos. (Think of Rick Santorum’s comment that birth control is bad because it’s “a license to do things in the sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”) Liberals are the devil in this narrative because they want to destroy or subvert all sources of moral order. 

Actually, there’s a second subtext in the Reagan narrative in which liberty is the sacred object. Circling around liberty would seem, on its face, to be more consistent with liberalism and its many liberation movements than with social conservatism. But here’s where narrative analysis really helps. Part of Reagan’s political genius was that he told a single story about America that rallied libertarians and social conservatives, who are otherwise strange bedfellows. He did this by presenting liberal activist government as the single devil that is eternally bent on destroying two different sets of sacred values — economic liberty and moral order. Only if all nonliberals unite into a coalition of tribes can this devil be defeated. 

If you follow the sacredness, you can understand some of the weirdness of the last few months in politics. In January, the Obama administration announced that religiously affiliated hospitals and other institutions must offer health plans that provide free contraception to their members. It’s one thing for the government to insist that people have a right to buy a product that their employer abhors. But it’s a rather direct act of sacrilege (for many Christians) for the government to force religious institutions to pay for that product. The outraged reaction galvanized the Christian right and gave a lift to Rick Santorum’s campaign. 

AROUND this time, bills were making their way through state legislatures requiring that women undergo a medically unnecessary ultrasound before they can have an abortion. It’s one thing for a state government to make abortions harder to get (as with a waiting period). But it’s a rather direct act of sacrilege (for nearly all liberals as well as libertarians) for a state to force a doctor to insert a probe into a woman’s vagina. The outraged reaction galvanized the secular left and gave a lift to President Obama. 

This is why we’ve seen the sudden re-emergence of the older culture war — the one between the religious right and the secular left that raged for so many years before the financial crisis and the rise of the Tea Party. When sacred objects are threatened, we can expect a ferocious tribal response. The right perceives a “war on Christianity” and gears up for a holy war. The left perceives a “war on women” and gears up for, well, a holy war. 

The timing could hardly be worse. America faces multiple threats and challenges, many of which will require each side to accept a “grand bargain” that imposes, at the very least, painful compromises on core economic values. But when your opponent is the devil, bargaining and compromise are themselves forms of sacrilege."

George HW Bush letter to Bill Clinton suggests there is some grace in politics

Washington (CNN)Hillary Clinton posted a letter on Instagram from former President George H.W. Bush to her husband welcoming former President Bill Clinton to the White House, amid increased questions about whether Donald Trump will accept the results of a November election.

"This is what leadership looks like," Clinton said Thursday on Instagram.

Bush did not win re-election in his 1992 presidential race against the former president but wished Clinton "good luck."

"I wish you great happiness here," Bush wrote on Jan 20, 1993.

"You will be our president when you read this note," he added. "I wish you well. I wish your family well."

Another World - C.S Lewis

“If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.”

― C.S. Lewis

Rewriting Earth's Creation Story “We as a scientific community created an origin myth that has no more intellectual value than Genesis.”

From the Atlantic

...Ever since Apollo astronauts toted chunks of the moon back home, the story has sounded something like this: After coalescing from grains of dust that swirled around the newly ignited sun, the still-cooling Earth would have been covered in seas of magma, punctured by inky volcanoes spewing sulfur and liquid rock. The young planet was showered in asteroids and larger structures called planetisimals, one of which sheared off a portion of Earth and formed the moon. Just as things were finally settling down, about a half-billion years after the solar system formed, the Earth and moon were again bombarded by asteroids whose onslaught might have liquefied the young planet—and sterilized it.

Geologists named this epoch the Hadean, after the Greek version of the underworld. Only after the so-called Late Heavy Bombardment quieted some 3.9 billion years ago did Earth finally start to morph into the Edenic, cloud-covered, watery world we know.But as it turns out, the Hadean may not have been so hellish. New analysis of Earth and moon rocks suggest that instead of a roiling ball of lava, baby Earth was a world with continents, oceans of water, and maybe even an atmosphere. It might not have been bombarded by asteroids at all, or at least not in the large quantities scientists originally thought. The Hadean might have been downright hospitable, raising questions about how long ago life could have arisen on this planet.

“Although, if you go back to the original Greek Hell, Hades, you had to cross a river. It’s a cool, wet place. So maybe the joke is on us,” says Mark Harrison, a geologist at the University of California at Los Angeles...

...“So maybe the Hadean was not so Hades-like,” Reimink says.

Wadhwa says lunar samples and zircon samples are so limited that we still can’t paint a full picture of the Earth’s turbulent early days. In one sense, everyone might be a little bit right. Earth might have been nice and calm in the time between major impacts. Or some areas might have been molten, while some areas might have been solid and covered in oceans, she says.
One thing is clear, however: Harrison says there has never been any evidence to support the canonical hellish vision of magma lakes and tar-colored volcanos showered in fiery meteors.

“There is absolutely not a single scrap of observational evidence that requires that scenario ever took place. We as a scientific community created an origin myth that has no more intellectual value than 1 Genesis,” Harrison says. “Although we’re very quick to criticize those that operate on faith, that’s exactly what we did.”

Theology of glory vs theology of the cross ... in the ratings

"...To use another TV analogy, given the choice between the life of Mad Men‘s Don Draper (glamorous, wealthy, powerful, ascendant) and FNL‘s Eric Taylor (gritty, financially tenuous, scrutinized, downwardly mobile), most of us would choose Draper’s. But given the choice of which man we would rather be, the tables turn (ht RJH). Draper is defined by deceit, self-hatred, cold-hearted manipulation and loneliness, while Taylor is fiercely loved, has a strong backbone (and knows how to use it), genuine self-respect and is capable of meaningful relationships with others. He is the happier and healthier person, by far. The kicker here (pun intended) is that, as human beings/sinners, we are instinctually drawn to a theology of glory – to cast ourselves as the hero of our particular story, the master of our domain, if you will. We want to believe that we’re on the side of the angels, that if we dig deep enough, we can summon what we need to triumph. We don’t like stories about pain or defeat, however touching/honest they may be – we tolerate suffering only to the degree that it pays off – we want our Easter sans Good Friday, thank you very much. The urge is to see through our Calvary, rather than take it for what it is: a death. 

The theology of glory will trump the theology of the cross every time… in the ratings..."

From Mbird.com

Morality Binds and Blinds

From Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind

“Morality binds and blinds. This is not just something that happens to people on the other side. We all get sucked into tribal moral communities. We circle around sacred values and then share post hoc arguments about why we are so right and they are so wrong. We think the other side is blind to truth, reason, science, and common sense, but in fact everyone goes blind when talking about their sacred objects… If you want to understand another group, follow the sacredness.”

Why Sam Harris is Unlikely to Change his Mind - Jonathan Haidt

From Jonathan Haidt and the rest here from the Evolution Institute

The New Atheist Sam Harris recently offered to pay $10,000 to anyone who can disprove his arguments about morality. Jonathan Haidt analyzes the nature of reasoning, and the ease with which reason becomes a servant of the passions. He bets $10,000 that Harris will not change his mind. 

Reason has long been worshipped by philosophers and intellectuals. In Plato’s dialogue Timaeus, the gods created humankind with a soul of perfect rationality and inserted it into our spherical heads, which were “the most divine part of us and the lord of all that is in us.” (The Gods then realized that they had to create necks, to keep reason insulated from the seething passions of the rest of the body.) During the “age of reason,” the French revolutionaries pulled the Christs and crucifixes out of the cathedrals and replaced them with images of reason. And in our own time, the New Atheists have written books and started foundations urging people to fight religion with reason.

The New Atheist Sam Harris has even gone so far as to argue, in his book The Moral Landscape, that reason and science can tell us what is right and wrong. Morality is—in his definition—limited to questions about “the well-being of conscious creatures.” Well-being can be measured objectively, he says, by methods such as fMRI scans. Therefore, whatever practices, customs, and ways of living maximize those measurements are morally correct; others are morally wrong. He does not say that there is a single best society (hence the image of a landscape, with multiple peaks). But he claims that moral values are facts, no different from the kinds of facts discovered by chemists. Scientific methods give correct answer to questions in chemistry, and they can therefore do so for morality as well. Harris’s confidence in his reasoned argument is so strong that he has issued The Moral Landscape Challenge: He will personally pay $10,000 to anyone who submits an essay so logically compelling that it makes him change his mind and renounce his views. (The contest closes February 9.) 

Critics of religion are right that science has a long track record of undermining claims about God’s role in the material world. Miracles don’t seem to occur as frequently as they used to. But the funny thing is that in the last 40 years, science has also undermined claims about the role and reliability of reason in our daily lives. In the 1960s, psychologists began studying the mind as a kind of computer. But in the 1970s, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky began documenting the many bugs, or intuitive biases, in the software. For example, people are more likely to choose a surgical procedure when the outcome is framed in terms of the odds of survival, rather than the (equivalent) odds of death...

...In the 2000s, in my own area of research—moral judgment—it became clear that people make judgments of right and wrong almost instantly, and then make up supporting reasons later. The intuitive dog wags its rational tail, which explains why it is so difficult to change anyone’s mind on a moral issue by refuting every reason they offer. To sum it all up, David Hume was right in 1739 when he wrote that reason was “the slave of the passions,” rather than the divine master, or charioteer, as Plato had believed. 

I’m not saying that we can’t reason quite well about many unemotional situations where we really want to know the right answer, such as whether it is better to drive or take the train to the airport, given current traffic conditions. But when we look at conscious verbal reasoning as an evolutionary adaptation, it begins to look more like a tool for helping people argue, persuade, and guard their reputations than a tool shaped by selection pressures for finding objective truth. Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber synthesized the large bodies of research on reasoning in cognitive and social psychology like this: “The function of reasoning is argumentative. It is to devise and evaluate arguments intended to persuade…. Skilled arguers are not after the truth but after arguments supporting their views.” When self-interest, partisan identity, or strong emotions are involved, reasoning turns into a lawyer, using all its powers to reach the desired conclusion... 

...If reasoning is so easily swayed by passions, then what kind of reasoning should we expect from people who hate religion and love reason? Open-minded, scientific thinking that tries to weigh the evidence on all sides? Or standard lawyerly reasoning that strives to reach a pre-ordained conclusion? When I was doing the research for The Righteous Mind, I read the New Atheist books carefully, and I noticed that several of them sounded angry. I also noticed that they used rhetorical structures suggesting certainty far more often than I was used to in scientific writing – words such as “always” and “never,” as well as phrases such as “there is no doubt that…” and “clearly we must…” 

To check my hunch, I took the full text of the three most important New Atheist books—Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, Sam Harris’s The End of Faith, and Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell and I ran the files through a widely used text analysis program that counts words that have been shown to indicate certainty, including “always,” “never,” “certainly,” “every,” and “undeniable.” To provide a close standard of comparison, I also analyzed three recent books by other scientists who write about religion but are not considered New Atheists: Jesse Bering’s The Belief Instinct, Ara Norenzayan’s Big Gods, and my own book The Righteous Mind...

...Reason is indeed crucial for good public policy and a good society. But isn’t the most reasonable approach one that takes seriously the known flaws of human reasoning and tries to work around them? Individuals can’t be trusted to reason well when passions come into play, yet good reasoning can sometimes emerge from groups. This is why science works so well. Scientists suffer from the confirmation bias like everybody else, but the genius of science as an institution is that it incentivizes scientists to disconfirm each others’ ideas, and it creates a community within which a reasoned consensus eventually emerges. 

I agree with Harris that the historical shift away from revealed religion as the basis of society and toward democracy, individual rights, reason, and science as foundations of moral and political authority has been overwhelmingly good for people in Western societies. I am not anti-reason. I am also not anti-religion. I am opposed to dogmatism. I am skeptical of each person’s individual powers of reasoning, and I’m even more skeptical of the reasoning of groups of activists, hyper-partisans, and other righteous reformers who would remake society according to their own reasoned (or revealed) vision... 

...If we want to improve our politics and our society, let’s be reasonable about reason and its limitations. Of course, I have used my powers of reasoning (and intuition) to write this essay, and I have drawn on scientific studies to back up my claim that Harris is unlikely to change his mind and renounce his claims about morality. But people are complicated and it’s always hazardous to use scientific studies to predict the behavior of an individual. I could well be wrong.

Sam Harris's fair response can also be found here where he addresses the findings of "certainty" words and when he did change his mind.

Let's condemn religion...?

Condemn religion

"All major religions are equally valid and basically teach the same thing."	To assert that the doctrinal differences between religions are insignificant is itself a doctrine, and one that is indefensible.
"Each religion sees part of spiritual truth, but none can see the whole truth. "	From what absolute vantage point can you claim to relativize the absolute claims of the different scriptures?
"Religious belief is too culturally and historically conditioned to be 'truth'"	If you say "no belief can be held as universally true for everyone", then by your own rules you can't say that this statement is universally true.
"It is arrogant to insist your religion is right and to convert others to it."	If you say "all religious claims to have a better view of things are arrogant and wrong", then by your own rules that statement is arrogant and wrong.

H/T: This university website 

"Some People Have More Equal Rights Than Others"

Orwell's quote from Animal Farm: All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others 

Peter Hitchens (the late Christopher Hitchens Brother) on why he wrote The Rage Against God

"I want to explain how I became convinced, by reason and experience, of the necessity and rightness of a form of Christianity that is modest, accommodating and thoughtful - but ultimately uncompromising about its vital truth. I hope very much that by doing so I can at least cause those who consider themselves to be atheists to hesitate over their choice. I also hope to provide Christian readers with insights they can use the better to understand their unbelieving friends, and so perhaps to sow some small seeds of doubt in the minds of those friends."

- Peter Hitchens, The Rage Against God

Christopher Hitchens' statement with Pastor Douglas Wilson

Barack Obama on different points of view

I don’t agree that you, when you become students at colleges, have to be coddled and protected from different points of view. I think you should be able to — anybody who comes to speak to you and you disagree with, you should have an argument with ‘em. But you shouldn’t silence them by saying, “You can’t come because I’m too sensitive to hear what you have to say.” That’s not the way we learn either.

Barack Obama, September 14, 2015

California's State Religion

From and the rest at the Orange County Register 

In a state ruled by a former Jesuit, perhaps we should not be shocked to find ourselves in the grip of an incipient state religion. Of course, this religion is not actually Christianity, or even anything close to the dogma of Catholicism, but something that increasingly resembles the former Soviet Union, or present-day Iran and Saudi Arabia, than the supposed world center of free, untrammeled expression. 

Two pieces of legislation introduced in the Legislature last session, but not yet enacted, show the power of the new religion. One is Senate Bill 1146, which seeks to limit the historically broad exemptions the state and federal governments have provided religious schools to, well, be religious. 

Under the rubric of official “tolerance,” the bill would only allow religiously focused schools to deviate from the secular orthodoxy required at nonreligious schools, including support for transgender bathrooms or limitations on expressions of faith by students and even Christian university presidents, in a much narrower range of educational activity than ever before. Many schools believe the bill would needlesslyrisk their mission and funding to “solve” gender and social equity problems on their campuses that currently don’t exist... 

...For the record, I am neither a Christian, nor do I deny that climate change could pose a potential serious long-term threat to humanity. What worries me most is the idea that one must embrace official orthodoxy about how to combat this phenomenon, or question its priority over so many other pressing concerns, such as alleviating poverty, both here and abroad, protecting the oceans or a host of other issues. Similarly, I have always disagreed with holy rollers like Sen. Ted Cruz, who would seek to limit, for example, abortion or the rights of gay people to marry, or would allow school prayer. 

But the new progressive intolerance now represents, in many ways, as great, if not more pervasive, a threat to the republic than that posed by either religious fundamentalists or even the most fervent climate change denier. It violates the Madisonian principle that assumed that religious and moral ideas “must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man; and it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate.” To revoke that principle is to reduce the United States to just another authoritarian state, even if the official ideology is couched in scientific research or estimable embrace of racial or gender differences... 

...Ultimately, we as Americans – and Californians – will pay a price for this. History is replete with stories of decline brought on by enforced official orthodoxy, from Byzantium to China’s Qing dynasty, the Spain of the Inquisition, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union or the current religious autocracies of the contemporary Middle East. As we seek to limit options and ways of thought about everything from marriage and bathrooms to how the planet operates, we don’t just persecute dissenters. We also undermine our ability to innovate, adapt and evolve as a society.

Neil deGrasse Tyson thinks there's a 'very high' chance the universe is just a simulation

From Tech Insider

We trust the scientists around us to have the best grasp on how the world actually works.

So at this year's 2016 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate at the American Museum of Natural History, which addressed the question of whether the universe is a simulation, the answers from some panelists may be more comforting than the responses from others.

Physicist Lisa Randall, for example, said she thought the odds that the universe isn't "real" are so low as to be "effectively zero."

A satisfying answer for those who don't want to sit there puzzling out what it would mean for the universe not to be real, to be sure.

But on the other hand, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, who was hosting the debate, said that he thinks the likelihood of the universe being a simulation "may be very high."

Tyson points out that we humans have always defined ourselves as the smartest beings alive, orders of magnitude more intelligent than species like chimpanzees that share close to 99%of our DNA. We can create symphonies and do trigonometry and astrophysics (some of us, anyway).

But Tyson uses a thought experiment to imagine a life-form that's as much smarter than us as we are than dogs, chimps, or other terrestrial mammals.

"What would we look like to them? We would be drooling, blithering idiots in their presence," he says.

Whatever that being is, it very well might be able to create a simulation of a universe.

Gobias Industries

via Arrested Development

"Maybe the worst bluff I've ever seen"

No such thing as a Philosophy-Free Science?

Scientists sometimes deceive themselves into thinking that philosophical ideas are only, at best, decorations or parasitic commentaries on the hard, objective triumphs of science, and that they themselves are immune to the confusions that philosophers devote their lives to dissolving. But there is no such thing as philosophy-free science, there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination. 

Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Daniel Dennett, (An atheist and secularist, a member of the Secular Coalition for America advisory board) 

Thoughts on the Thoughts and Prayer Issue, and on "foundational and tradition-dependent assumptions"

From and the rest at CNN

"...America is deeply divided along the transcendence line. Tens of millions of Americans profess belief in a transcendent God. They include Christians, Jews, Muslims and people of many other faiths. Yet these generic labels are also imprecise; many self-identifying Christians and Jews reject the idea that God intervenes in the world in miraculous and supernatural ways.  

They may participate in religious practices. They may even pray. But they do not believe that prayer "works." They do not have a category of "forgiveness" that appeals to transcendent justice and mercy.  

They do not anticipate a transcendent world to come. Each of them lives out a kind of faith, but the content and contours of that faith is focused on the present physical world and the people in it. 

The transcendence line is not the difference between "belief" and "unbelief." Each of us lives according to strongly held commitments and values-infused beliefs. The liberal atheist who stands up for "equality" and "dignity" relies on foundational and tradition-dependent assumptions in much the same way as the religious conservative who defends "morality" and "truth."

Annoying Fundamentalists

"Socialism sounds great!" -- Thomas Sowell, a blatant conservative

From Thomas Sowell

Socialism sounds great. It has always sounded great. And it will probably always continue to sound great. It is only when you go beyond rhetoric, and start looking at hard facts, that socialism turns out to be a big disappointment, if not a disaster.  

While throngs of young people are cheering loudly for avowed socialist Bernie Sanders, socialism has turned oil-rich Venezuela into a place where there are shortages of everything from toilet paper to beer, where electricity keeps shutting down, and where there are long lines of people hoping to get food, people complaining that they cannot feed their families. 

With national income going down, and prices going up under triple-digit inflation in Venezuela, these complaints are by no means frivolous. But it is doubtful if the young people cheering for Bernie Sanders have even heard of such things, whether in Venezuela or in other countries around the world that have turned their economies over to politicians and bureaucrats to run. 

The anti-capitalist policies in Venezuela have worked so well that the number of companies in Venezuela is now a fraction of what it once was. That should certainly reduce capitalist "exploitation," shouldn't it? 

But people who attribute income inequality to capitalists exploiting workers, as Karl Marx claimed, never seem to get around to testing that belief against facts -- such as the fact that none of the Marxist regimes around the world has ever had as high a standard of living for working people as there is in many capitalist countries. 

Facts are seldom allowed to contaminate the beautiful vision of the left. What matters to the true believers are the ringing slogans, endlessly repeated. When Senator Sanders cries, "The system is rigged!" no one asks, "Just what specifically does that mean?" or "What facts do you have to back that up?" 

In 2015, the 400 richest people in the world had net losses of $19 billion. If they had rigged the system, surely they could have rigged it better than that. But the very idea of subjecting their pet notions to the test of hard facts will probably not even occur to those who are cheering for socialism and for other bright ideas of the political left. 

How many of the people who are demanding an increase in the minimum wage have ever bothered to check what actually happens when higher minimum wages are imposed? More often they just assume what is assumed by like-minded peers -- sometimes known as "everybody," with their assumptions being what "everybody knows."... 

...The great promise of socialism is something for nothing. It is one of the signs of today's dumbed-down education that so many college students seem to think that the cost of their education should -- and will -- be paid by raising taxes on "the rich." Here again, just a little check of the facts would reveal that higher tax rates on upper-income earners do not automatically translate into more tax revenue coming in to the government. 

Often high tax rates have led to less revenue than lower tax rates. In a globalized economy, high tax rates may just lead investors to invest in other countries with lower tax rates. That means that jobs created by those investments will be overseas. None of this is rocket science. But you do have to stop and think -- and that is what too many of our schools and colleges are failing to teach their students to do.

A Confession of Liberal Intolerance - (from a liberal)

From the New York Times

"We progressives believe in diversity, and we want women, blacks, Latinos, gays and Muslims at the table — er, so long as they aren’t conservatives. 

Universities are the bedrock of progressive values, but the one kind of diversity that universities disregard is ideological and religious. We’re fine with people who don’t look like us, as long as they think like us. 

O.K., that’s a little harsh. But consider George Yancey, a sociologist who is black and evangelical. 

“Outside of academia I faced more problems as a black,” he told me. “But inside academia I face more problems as a Christian, and it is not even close.” 

I’ve been thinking about this because on Facebook recently I wondered aloud whether universities stigmatize conservatives and undermine intellectual diversity. The scornful reaction from my fellow liberals proved the point... 

...Jonathan Haidt, a centrist social psychologist at New York University, cites data suggesting that the share of conservatives in academia has plunged, and he has started a website, Heterodox Academy, to champion ideological diversity on campuses. 

“Universities are unlike other institutions in that they absolutely require that people challenge each other so that the truth can emerge from limited, biased, flawed individuals,” he says. “If they lose intellectual diversity, or if they develop norms of ‘safety’ that trump challenge, they die. And this is what has been happening since the 1990s.” 

Should universities offer affirmative action for conservatives and evangelicals? I don’t think so, partly because surveys find that conservative scholars themselves oppose the idea. But it’s important to have a frank discussion on campuses about ideological diversity. To me, this seems a liberal blind spot. 

Universities should be a hubbub of the full range of political perspectives from A to Z, not just from V to Z. So maybe we progressives could take a brief break from attacking the other side and more broadly incorporate values that we supposedly cherish — like diversity — in our own dominions."

The day we discovered our parents were Russian spies - The Guardian

From the Guardian

"...If Tim and Alex’s story sounds eerily familiar to fans of The Americans, the television drama about a KGB couple living in the US with their two children, that’s because it’s partly based on them. The show is set in the 1980s, providing a cold war backdrop, but the 2010 spy round-up served as an inspiration. The show’s creator, Joe Weisberg, trained to be a CIA case officer in the early 1990s and, when I speak to him on the phone, tells me he always wanted to put family at the heart of the plot. “One of the interesting things I saw when I worked at the CIA was people lying to their children. If you have young children, you can’t tell them you work for the CIA. And then, at some point, you have to pick an age and a time, and they find out that they’ve been lied to for most of their lives. It’s a difficult moment.” 

When I meet Alex in Moscow, he has just finished watching the first season. (He had started on previous occasions, but found it too difficult; he and Tim joked that they should sue the creators.) His parents like the show, he tells me. “Obviously it’s glamorised, all this killing people and action everywhere. But it reminded them of when they were young agents, and how they felt about being in a strange new place.” Watching it, Alex says, has made him more curious: what set his parents off on this path, and why?..."

Hayek's The Road to Serfdom...in Cartoon!

Is "Religion" Dead?

From the WSJ

"God is not dead. Despite the predictions of academics and liberal religious leaders, the world is becoming more faith-filled, not less. According to Rodney Stark, the co-director of the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University, there has been no rise of the “nones”—no increase in the number of the world’s self-professed atheists and no triumph of reason over revelation...

...Mr. Stark argues that, in general, the government sponsorship of religion is a hindrance to the growth of a faith. Monopoly destroys competition, and competition, he says, causes growth—in religious affiliation as much as in the marketplace for goods and services. In many places around the globe, the competition among Muslims, evangelicals, Catholics, Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses and hundreds of smaller religious groups has resulted in an atmosphere of revival. A smug complacency has been replaced by a fervor to win souls.

Not in Europe, however, where the churches, once so important, are now empty. For the champions of the secularization thesis, such a development is nothing to complain about: Empty churches are a sign of reason’s progress. Mr. Stark offers some amusing evidence to the contrary. Drawing on the Gallup poll, he notes that Europeans hold all sorts of supernatural beliefs. In Austria, 28% of respondents say they believe in fortune tellers; 32% believe in astrology; and 33% believe in lucky charms. “More than 20 percent of Swedes believe in reincarnation,” Mr. Stark writes; “half believe in mental telepathy.” More than half of Icelanders believe in huldufolk, hidden people like elves and trolls. It seems as if the former colonial outposts for European missionaries are now becoming more religious, while Europe itself is becoming interested in primitive folk beliefs.

Huldufolk. Hul du have thought?

Mr. Stark may criticize the methods of Pew and other polling firms, but there is no doubt that fewer Americans than ever before claim an association with a particular sect or denomination. They may be religious by some definition, but they are “unchurched.” The folks at Pew are not atheist triumphalists. They do seem to be tracking what Mr. Stark acknowledges to be the “social consequences” of the changes in the way people identify..." 

Wise words from Justin Bieber...

“If we can understand that we’re all imperfect, let’s come to God and come for his help. You’re not weak by doing that. I think that’s a common misperception of Christians, that you’re being weak because you can’t handle it. None of us can handle this world, dude! It’s eating us alive. But, man, I don’t wanna have to do it on my own.”

- Justin Bieber

Book Review: 'The Twilight of the American Enlightenment' by George M. Marsden

From the WSJ

Almost all of the 'big idea' books of the 1950s shared the premise that self-fulfillment was the highest moral good.

By 

BARTON SWAIM

April 6, 2014 4:56 p.m. ET

Google the phrase "take America back" and you'll find thousands of people who feel their nation has been commandeered and must be retaken—maybe by force, maybe in a metaphorical sense; you're never sure. True, today the sentiment may be popular on the political right, but during the presidency of George W. Bush it was the left that wanted to take America back from right-wing religious nut jobs. It seems extraordinary that so many people can speak of their country as if it has been overtaken by a hostile force with whom they share no premises or aims.

The historian George Marsden, whose book "Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism" (1991) is widely and correctly regarded as the best historical treatment of Christian fundamentalism, traces this way of thinking—commonly summed up with the word "polarization"—to the 1950s. The '50s,
Mr. Marsden argues in "The Twilight of the American Enlightenment," was a time of cultural and political consensus. The U.S. had beaten two deadly foes in World War II, and Americans were enjoying unprecedented levels of prosperity; the future seemed secure. 

In politics, the opening of the Cold War had a unifying effect, and in religion the Protestant mainline enjoyed a quasi-establishment status. A sense of unified national purpose permeated the public sphere, and questions of personal morality were more or less agreed on.

But the midcentury consensus turned out to be flimsy. The liberals who dominated political and intellectual life, Mr. Marsden writes, "were passionately committed to principles such as individual freedom, free speech, human decency, justice, civil rights," and so on. But "their justification for these principles was not that they were fixed in a higher law or derived from an ideology. Rather, it was that these principles had evolved historically in the give and take of human experience in free societies." So, if the intellectuals' ideals weren't based on anything outside the self, the only other place to look was inside.

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Mr. Marsden scrutinizes the arguments of several of the decade's "big idea" books, among them David Riesman's "The Lonely Crowd" (1950) and Erich Fromm's "The Sane Society" (1955), and finds that all but one share a premise: that the highest moral good lay in personal self-fulfillment. The one exception—"Essays in the Public Philosophy" (1955) by the venerated liberal intellectual Walter Lippmann—advocated a rejuvenation of thinking on natural law. Whatever the book's problems, Mr. Marsden says, Lippmann saw that a free and prosperous society couldn't sustain itself on the brittle principle of being true to one's self. Lippmann's book received a cold reception.

The other governing principle in the decade's intellectual discourse held that the only unquestionable kind of knowledge was knowledge arrived at through scientific inquiry. That this second principle flatly contradicted the first, as Mr. Marsden notes, gives you some idea of how weak the era's philosophical foundations were. Even mainstream liberal theologians such as Reinhold Niebuhr, while resisting the more imperialistic claims of scientism, conceded the supremacy of scientific knowledge. As a result, Niebuhr wrote so that his many admirers could easily accept his conclusions but reject his God. Indeed for many educated people in the 1950s, Mr. Marsden observes, God was a kind of "useful ally" who confirmed their own opinions.

The midcentury consensus didn't allow much room for principles and opinions that were substantively informed by religious convictions. So it was not prepared when religion obstinately refused to decline as predicted and in fact grew in diversity and fervor. Liberal academics and intellectuals, still working with the old liberal-consensus model, tended increasingly to see religiously informed opinions on "public" topics as illegitimate; they insisted that religious conviction should be relegated to the sphere of "private" opinion.

Hence the "culture wars": disputes about politics and morality in which the disputants seem to operate from completely different sets of assumptions about life. While secularized liberals tried to rule the opinions of religious people somehow out of bounds, many Christians in fundamentalist and evangelical traditions responded by advocating a return to the allegedly Christian principles of the nation's founding—often sounding as if they would take us back to 17th-century New England. Brushing aside the rhetoric of both sides, Mr. Marsden astutely points out that fundamentalists and evangelicals on the political right are not theocrats; they value Enlightenment principles of individual rights and economic opportunity as much as their secularist adversaries.

Here Mr. Marsden moves from a tone of (mostly) detached historical analysis to one of measured exhortation. Instead of engaging in yet more culture warfare, he counsels, members of the "religious right" should consider the "principled pluralism" of Dutch theologian and politician Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920). Kuyper, prime minister of the Netherlands from 1901 to 1905 and a devout Christian believer, rejected the idea of a "neutral" public sphere. In his writings and policies he advocated openness about presuppositions—whether of the secular or religious kind—and insisted that even those who disagree on fundamental principles can work toward equitable compromise...

Mr. Swaim is writing a book on political language and public life.