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.

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."

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

"The government cannot bestow dignity, and it cannot take it away" - Justice Clarence Thomas

The Righteous Mind - Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

NY Times Review

You’re smart. You’re liberal. You’re well informed. You think conservatives are narrow-minded. You can’t understand why working-class Americans vote Republican. You figure they’re being duped. You’re wrong.

This isn’t an accusation from the right. It’s a friendly warning from Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia who, until 2009, considered himself a partisan liberal. In “The ­Righteous Mind,” Haidt seeks to enrich liberalism, and political discourse generally, with a deeper awareness of human nature. Like other psychologists who have ventured into political coaching, such as George Lakoff and Drew Westen, Haidt argues that people are fundamentally intuitive, not rational. If you want to persuade others, you have to appeal to their sentiments. But Haidt is looking for more than victory. He’s looking for wisdom. That’s what makes “The Righteous Mind” well worth reading. Politics isn’t just about ­manipulating people who disagree with you. It’s about learning from them...

...The problem isn’t that people don’t reason. They do reason. But their arguments aim to support their conclusions, not yours. Reason doesn’t work like a judge or teacher, impartially weighing evidence or guiding us to wisdom. It works more like a lawyer or press secretary, justifying our acts and judgments to others...

... He and his colleagues have compiled a catalog of six fundamental ideas that commonly undergird moral systems: care, fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority and sanctity. Alongside these principles, he has found related themes that carry moral weight: divinity, community, hierarchy, tradition, sin and degradation.

The worldviews Haidt discusses may differ from yours. They don’t start with the individual. They start with the group or the cosmic order. They exalt families, armies and communities. They assume that people should be treated differently according to social role or status — elders should be honored, subordinates should be protected. They suppress forms of self-expression that might weaken the social fabric. They assume interdependence, not autonomy. They prize order, not equality.

These moral systems aren’t ignorant or backward. Haidt argues that they’re common in history and across the globe because they fit human nature. He compares them to cuisines. We acquire morality the same way we acquire food preferences: we start with what we’re given. If it tastes good, we stick with it. If it doesn’t, we reject it. People accept God, authority and karma because these ideas suit their moral taste buds. Haidt points to research showing that people punish cheaters, accept many hierarchies and don’t support equal distribution of benefits when contributions are unequal.

You don’t have to go abroad to see these ideas. You can find them in the Republican Party. Social conservatives see welfare and feminism as threats to responsibility and family stability. The Tea Party hates redistribution because it interferes with letting people reap what they earn. Faith, patriotism, valor, chastity, law and order — these Republican themes touch all six moral foundations, whereas Democrats, in Haidt’s analysis, focus almost entirely on care and fighting oppression. This is Haidt’s startling message to the left: When it comes to morality, conservatives are more broad-minded than liberals. They serve a more varied diet...

...One of these interests is moral capital — norms, prac­tices and institutions, like religion and family values, that facilitate cooperation by constraining individualism. Toward this end, Haidt applauds the left for regulating corporate greed. But he worries that in other ways, liberals dissolve moral capital too recklessly. Welfare programs that substitute public aid for spousal and parental support undermine the ecology of the family. Education policies that let students sue teachers erode classroom authority. Multicultural education weakens the cultural glue of assimilation. Haidt agrees that old ways must sometimes be re-examined and changed. He just wants liberals to proceed with caution and protect the social pillars sustained by tradition...

...The hardest part, Haidt finds, is getting liberals to open their minds. Anecdotally, he reports that when he talks about authority, loyalty and sanctity, many people in the audience spurn these ideas as the seeds of racism, sexism and homophobia. And in a survey of 2,000 Americans, Haidt found that self-described liberals, especially those who called themselves “very liberal,” were worse at predicting the moral judgments of moderates and conservatives than moderates and conservatives were at predicting the moral judgments of liberals. Liberals don’t understand conservative values. And they can’t recognize this failing, because they’re so convinced of their rationality, open-mindedness and enlightenment.

Haidt isn’t just scolding liberals, however. He sees the left and right as yin and yang, each contributing insights to which the other should listen. In his view, for instance, liberals can teach conservatives to recognize and constrain predation by entrenched interests. Haidt believes in the power of reason, but the reasoning has to be interactive. It has to be other people’s reason engaging yours. We’re lousy at challenging our own beliefs, but we’re good at challenging each other’s. Haidt compares us to neurons in a giant brain, capable of “producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system.”

Jerry Seinfeld Says Colleges Are Too Politically Correct

Jerry Seinfield 

"I hear that all the time," Seinfeld said. "I don't play colleges, but I hear a lot of people tell me, 'Don't go near colleges. They're so PC.' I'll give you an example: My daughter's 14. My wife says to her, 'Well, you know, in the next couple years, I think maybe you’re going to want to be hanging around the city more on the weekends, so you can see boys.' You know what my daughter says? She says, ‘That’s sexist.’ They just want to use these words: 'That’s racist'; 'That’s sexist'; 'That’s prejudice.' They don’t know what they’re talking about.”

The Contemprary Liberals Mindset?

"...Contemporary liberals increasingly think and talk like a class of self-satisfied commissars enforcing a comprehensive, uniformly secular vision of the human good. The idea that someone, somewhere might devote her life to an alternative vision of the good — one that clashes in some respects with liberalism's moral creed — is increasingly intolerable. 

That is a betrayal of what's best in the liberal tradition. 

Liberals should be pleased and express gratitude when people do good deeds, whether or not those deeds are motivated by faith. They should also be content to give voluntary associations (like religious colleges) wide latitude to orient themselves to visions of the human good rooted in traditions and experiences that transcend liberal modernity — provided they don't clash in a fundamental way with liberal ideals and institutions.

In the end, what we're seeing is an effort to greatly expand the list of beliefs, traditions, and ways of life that fundamentally clash with liberalism. That is an effort that no genuine liberal should want to succeed. 

What happened to a liberalism of skepticism, modesty, humility, and openness to conflicting notions of the highest good? What happened to a liberalism of pluralism that recognizes that when people are allowed to search for truth in freedom, they are liable to seek and find it in a multitude of values, beliefs, and traditions? What happened to a liberalism that sees this diversity as one of the finest flowers of a free society rather than a threat to the liberal democratic order? 

I don't have answers to these questions — and frankly, not a lot hinges on figuring out how we got here. What matters is that we acknowledge that something in the liberal mind has changed, and that we act to recover what has been lost."

The rest at theweek.com 

The shameful hypocrisy of our double standards on religion - TheWeek.com

"...For an exquisite example of such reactions, take a look at this Times editorial, which declares that nothing can "justify" the Texas exhibit and other "blatantly Islamophobic provocations" because they inflict "deliberate anguish on millions of devout Muslims," "exacerbate tensions," and "give extremists more fuel." 

Maybe that's right. But then shouldn't the Times editorial board also denounce The Book of Mormon, the runaway hit musical playing just a few blocks up the street from the Times offices for the past several years? Strangely, I can recall no such denunciation, even though the play relentlessly and vulgarly (and brilliantly!) ridicules the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from start to finish. Why has the Times neglected to rise to the defense of the LDS against this blatantly Mormonphobic provocation? Is it only because Mormons don't resort to terrorism over ecclesiastical insults?...

..."It is easy to appreciate the dilemma Lynne Meadow, the Manhattan Theater Club's artistic director, found herself in, but it is impossible to approve her decision," wrote the Times in an editorial titled "Censoring Terrence McNally," explaining that artist freedom demanded she not capitulate to the critics. Instead, she should have opted for "standing firm and relying on the police for protection." 

That was 17 years ago. Is there any chance that standards have evolved since then — that the Times now simply cares less about freedom of expression than it once did, and that it would apply this changed standard equally to both Christians and Muslims today? Do we have reason to anticipate editorials denouncing the Christophobic prejudices of various cultural exhibitions and events taking place around New York City, along with calls to shut them down for fear of inflicting deliberate anguish on millions of devout Christians? 

That certainly wouldn't make me happy. I'd prefer consistency in the other direction — in favor of a strong defense of free expression in nearly all cases..."

From Theweek.com

Parents Clinging To Lone Religious Element Of Daughter’s Wedding Ceremony - The Onion

ROCHESTER, NY—After sitting through an outdoor ceremony officiated by the groom’s best friend, local parents Scott and Linda McNeil were clinging to the lone religious element of their daughter’s wedding, sources confirmed Saturday. “The vows they wrote for each other were nice, but the passage from Corinthians they used on the back of the wedding program was just beautiful,” said Linda McNeil, adding that she and her husband were both deeply touched by the inclusion of the biblical quote “Love still stands when all else has fallen,” which appeared beneath a verse from a Sarah McLachlan song. “I’ve always loved that passage, and it’s a part of the Scripture that really captures who they are.” McNeil then added that she knew the small image of a dove above the quote would have made her late mother very happy.


A Portlandia Wedding too below (found from Mbird.com)

The Rational Ayatollah Hypothesis

From the Wall Street Journal - Opinion Piece

"...This was one of the lessons of the Holocaust, which the Nazis carried out even at the expense of the overall war effort. In 1944, with Russia advancing on a broad front and the Allies landing in Normandy, Adolf Eichmann pulled out all stops to deport more than 400,000 Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz in just two months. The Nazis didn’t even bother to make slaves of most of their prisoners to feed their war machine. Annihilation of the Jews was the higher goal. 

Modern Iran is not Nazi Germany, or so Iran’s apologists like to remind us. Then again, how different is the thinking of an Eichmann from that of a Khamenei, who in 2012 told a Friday prayer meeting that Israel was a “cancerous tumor that should be cut and will be cut”? 

Whether the Ayatollah Khamenei gets to act on his wishes, as Eichmann did, is another question. Mr. Obama thinks he won’t, because the ayatollah only pursues his Jew-hating hobby “at the margins,” as he told Mr. Goldberg, where it isn’t at the expense of his “self-interest.” Does it occur to Mr. Obama that Mr. Khamenei might operate according to a different set of principles than political or economic self-interest? What if Mr. Khamenei believes that some things in life are, in fact, worth fighting for, the elimination of Zionism above all? 

In November 2013 the president said at a fundraising event that he was “not a particularly ideological person.” Maybe Mr. Obama doesn’t understand the compelling power of ideology. Or maybe he doesn’t know himself. Either way, the tissue of assumptions on which his Iran diplomacy rests looks thinner all the time."

Why is there the usual political partisanship? Thomas Sowell (Part 2)

Part 1 here.

On the constrained and unconstrained visions.

Thomas Sowell : "with visions it is different. These are the implicit assumptions with which you operate. You may not articulate them even to yourself, but you are assuming certain things when you talk or when you think. Seldom are those things spelled out."

Sowell's 'visions' are basically views about two things: human nature and social knowledge. 

To take human nature first: the constrained vision has a sober and unsentimental view about it. It holds that human nature is essentially fixed – people are as we find them, exhibiting a mixture of motives, some social and some anti-social. Thus, if it is to succeed, public policy has to run with the grain of human nature as we know it and to avoid assuming that it will change in such a way as to help policy to succeed. This means that, in order to improve society, we must focus on institutions and try to understand the incentives people have to behave in social or anti-social ways. 

The unconstrained vision, by contrast, is optimistic about improving human nature. It sees people as naturally social and perfectible. Public policy is therefore not a matter of incentives but of freeing people to realise their natural, and naturally good, selves and educating them to conform to a new order.

A quite concise summary helpfully provided by New Zealand?

Finally, Thomas Sowell provides useful real life historical examples. The American Revolution and the French Revolution.

Well in France the idea was that if you simply put the right people in charge and created the right institutions, then all these problems would go away. In the United States, it was assumed from the outset that there were very limited things you could do and what you needed to do above all was to minimize the damage done by the flaws of human nature. This is why the United States for example has the Constitution, so much lamented by some of those who believe in the French Revolution in which this group is offset by that group and nobody can sort of run wild. If you believe that what you need is to have the right leaders who love the people and so on, a Messiah as it were, then your problems are solved. But if you do not believe there is any political Messiah, and you believe that you have to make sure that all people are restrained in what they are able to do, then you have the separation of power, you have elections, you have Constitutions, you have all kinds of things hemming you in. According to Houssay who was a great supporter of the French Revolution, could not understand why there was this separation of powers. Not even when at the end of his life, he was arbitrarily thrown into prison where he continued to write about why the Americans have this separation of power. And of course if there is going to be a separation of power he would not be rotting in prison. 

In other words, in the constrained vision, human nature = good. In the unconstrained vision, human nature = bad.

Atheism, Islam and liberalism: This is what we are really fighting about - Salon.com

From the Salon "Atheism, Islam and liberalism: This is what we are really fighting about: The debate raging in American culture boils down to an even simpler divide than you think" (quite the "motherlode", almost wanted to quote the whole very insightful article)

"Here’s a news flash: None of these heated public debates about atheism and religion, or about how Western “liberals” should think about Islam, ever reach a satisfactory conclusion. There are many reasons for this, including the fact that talk-show hosts and movie stars (just for instance) aren’t necessarily the best people to bring nuance or thoughtfulness or clarity to these conversations. An even bigger reason may be that religion in general, and fundamentalist religion in particular, is a major sore spot in Western culture, a source of tremendous vulnerability and anxiety... 

...On the other hand, Harris’ belief that reason and science can (or someday will) supply a transcendent, religion-like experience that satisfies the human yearning for spirituality, while relinquishing all claims to metaphysical truth, is almost charming. That’s an article of faith if I’ve ever heard one, and one that rests on what St. Augustine would have described as a theological heresy – a misguided faith in the perfectibility of man in this fallen world. There is something noble about Harris’ efforts to bridge the gap between science and philosophy, and also something severely naïve in his declaration that in the age of astrophysics we no longer need God. To phrase Augustine’s response in modern terms, what we know about human psychology to this point suggests that as a species we favor storytelling over facts, and that we do not draw much distinction between stories that are true, those that are metaphorically true and those that feel true but are entirely false. 

Indeed, I would argue that people who line up on opposing sides of the Harris-Aslan feud over religion and Islam represent fundamentally different worldviews, in ways they themselves may not recognize. I’m not talking about East vs. West or Muslim vs. Christian, and still less about lily-livered p.c. “progressives” vs. courageous contrarian truth-tellers, or however Bill Maher would like to phrase it. And I don’t precisely mean the difference between people of faith and the atheistic or irreligious. Those are facets of the dispute that are largely obvious. In a conversation between Richard Dawkins and Pope Francis (and I’d definitely pay to watch that), both would politely acknowledge that they hold divergent views about the fundamental nature of reality. What I really mean is the difference between humanities majors and science majors. 

That may sound like crude or facetious shorthand, but I believe it contains a genuine insight. Given that I clearly belong to one of these tribes (you get only one guess), it’s entirely likely that I will mischaracterize the other one. Such is the nature of the epistemological division. When I say that one side is primarily concerned with facts and the other with narrative, or that one side understands the world primarily in subjective, experiential and relativistic terms while the other focuses on objective and quantifiable phenomena and binary true-false questions, that may help us frame the profound mutual misunderstanding at work. Harris’ conception of religion as bad science, which seems like a ludicrous misreading to those who understand religion as a mythic force that shapes community and collective meaning, is a classic example. One side insists that the only important question is whether the truth-claims of religion are actually true; the other side says that question doesn’t even matter, and then wonders what “truth” is, anyway. It’s the overly literal-minded versus the hopelessly vague. 

What we see in discussions about religion in general and Islam in particular is a version of the same problem: People who barely speak the same language talking past each other, either making grand claims that refute themselves or raising legitimate questions that the other side ducks. I fall much closer to the Ben Affleck-Reza Aslan camp than to the tough-talkin’ pseudo-liberalism of Harris and Maher, as it slides toward a justification of permanent drone war and universal anti-Muslim profiling. But both sides engage in oversimplifications and ideological short cuts that seem like efforts to conceal what this debate is really about. Despite all its remarkable accomplishments, Western culture feels guilty and ill at ease. It traded in God for Snooki, swapped transcendent meaning and social cohesion for a vision of Enlightenment that started out bubbly and gradually went flat, like a can of week-old Mountain Dew. It’s not the kind of trade you can undo. 

At this point, Harris and Maher have become war trolls and fellow travelers of Dick Cheney, without even realizing it. It’s a sad fate for Maher, who was an acrid voice of resistance under the Bush administration. As for Harris, he has played an elaborate intellectual game of bait-and-switch since at least 9/11: He makes inflammatory comments about how we must wage war against Islam, or about the need to consider a nuclear first strike against a Muslim nation, and then backs away, protesting that he’s been taken out of context and actually thinks those things would be dreadful. He and Maher have provided covert aid and comfort to bigots who firebomb mosques or beat up “Muslim-looking” people at the mall, while officially being horrified by such hateful actions. They’re analogous to polite Southern whites of 1955, who did not personally use the N-word and found the Klan distasteful, but who never questioned the fundamental rightness of white supremacy. 

But Harris and Maher and other prominent anti-Muslim voices are right about one thing: Western leftists are often reluctant to criticize Islam, and it isn’t entirely healthy. This reluctance stems from many understandable causes: from sheer politeness, from a desire to promote harmony rather than discord, and from an eagerness not to come off as smug, xenophobic blowhards, the way Maher and Harris so often do. Of course the overwhelming majority of Muslims around the world do not support terrorism; that hardly need to be said. Despite right-wing claims to the contrary, any number of imams and Islamic community leaders have spoken out against the likes of al-Qaida and ISIS and Boko Haram. As Aslan has repeatedly observed, Islam looks very different in different countries, and like any other major religion it has many competing and overlapping currents. A Muslim woman cannot drive a car or go outdoors unaccompanied in Saudi Arabia, but she can go to the beach in cutoffs in Istanbul or go dancing all night in Dubai. 

Ultimately it does not aid the cause of tolerance to deny that social practice in most majority-Muslim nations involves a lot of stuff that Western liberals rightly find appalling: the subordination of women, the suppression or persecution of LGBT people, extremely limited tolerance for those of other faiths (or none) and sharply restricted freedom of expression. One can discuss these troubling aspects of real-world Islam – as Reza Aslan and many other Western Muslims frequently do, in fairness – while also insisting that you can’t understand them independent of social and historical context. We don’t have to follow Maher and Harris down the rabbit hole of unjustified assumptions and disastrous conclusions: Illiberality and intolerance are intrinsic elements of Muslim doctrine, they argue, and Islam is a zone of monolithic groupthink unlike any other world religion (“the mother lode of bad ideas,” says Harris). Therefore Islam is a global cancer or disease, which must be killed or cut out. 

Sam Harris genuinely appears to view himself as a voice of science and reason, defending the Western intellectual tradition against its enemies. So it’s striking that he has surrendered to a seductive and paranoid narrative about Islam as a corrosive, contagious and essentially evil force, which seems so devoid of the critical thinking that represents the Western tradition at its finest. To take the most obvious example, Harris must be aware that Middle Eastern nations have repeatedly been subjected to humiliating wars of invasion, conquest and expropriation that have killed millions of people. They play no evident role in his thinking about the state of Islam, which he appears to view as an unchanging entity. 

As Aslan or any other religious scholar could tell him, fundamentalism is a historically recent invention that emerged in response to the erosion of traditional social mores by the forces of modernity. Christian fundamentalism did not become a significant force until the 20th century; although William Jennings Bryan is claimed as a grandfather by today’s Christian right, he would have found its theology baffling and retrograde. Within Islam, the Salafi and Wahhabi revivalist movements that inform the theology of al-Qaida, ISIS and other extremist groups were relatively minor currents within the faith before exploding in the 1970s and ‘80s. Many historical forces fueled that rapid growth, but as Harris should be well aware, the American-supported jihad that eventually drove the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan played a major role. 

In both major religions, the rise of ultra-orthodox revival movements – and within them a tendency toward apocalyptic violence – represents a rearguard action, an attempt to regain the ground lost to science, pop culture, consumerism and other irreligious influences. Viewed through the long lens of history, fundamentalism is almost certainly a sign of religion’s decline and weakness, rather than the opposite. That doesn’t mean that violent splinter groups like ISIS are not dangerous, or that Christian fundamentalism at home does not pose political problems. But the exaggerated fear response of many liberal Westerners reflects our own culture’s weakness and moral uncertainty, not the strength of its enemies."

How Cultures Around The World Make Decisions

"...After Protestant colonists brought the concept of personal autonomy to the U.S., the idea was further cemented into the national psychology with Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Personal and religious freedom became irrevocably tied to economic freedom from the monarchy and early capitalism. “Americans were truly the only people that brought those ideas together,” says Sheena Iyengar, professor at Columbia Business School and author of The Art of Choosing (TED Talk: The art of choosing.) “It made the idea of personal autonomy such a dogma that it almost became a religion itself.” 

My fellow Americans and I believe that choice allows us to individuate ourselves, to prove that we are free. Our preferences, therefore, become who we are. We feel acutely the need to construct a personal narrative out of our choices and, thus, construct our own identity. 

There’s a certain degree to which this is sheer lunacy, and also fallacy. Because our cultural responsibility to revere choice has been instilled in us since before America was America. In other words, we never chose choice...

...Meanwhile, in America, a similar rhetoric rules. By not exercising your full range of choices, you are demonstrating yourself to be less than a full person — even though most people don’t exercise the choices they believe so strongly in, such as the right to vote. This is the fiction of choice in the West, says Carroll. “Individual choice is a powerful received idea, but frankly, it’s a bit of a white lie that our culture tells itself,” he says..."

From ideas.ted.com. And below are two models that were put out besides the American model.

The Amish model: Belonging, not choice, is crucial.

"“I have a very intelligent Amish friend who thinks the rest of us are crazy in how we view the professional choices we make,” says Kraybill. “We’re so anxious about our occupations that we’ll tear apart our families and move across the country for a job and end up living among strangers with no family or social support if we get ill or have an emergency. And put that way – how insane does that sound?”

Why should it be any less authentic to be a product of the family that raised you and the culture you grew up in and the religious institutions you participate in? Rather than knowing who you are by knowing your preferences, you know who you are by knowing what you belong to."

One Asian model: Focus on interdependence and harmony, not independence and self-expression.

In some Asian cultures, to fulfill your independent self is not the primary goal of an individual: The goal is to be interdependent and maintain relationships and make them harmonious. In Japan, for example, being a “going your own way” person is to be immature and not culturally sophisticated. Though people obviously have preferences, they often don’t choose what they like, because that’s not the ideal manner. “Your cultural task is harmony, not self-expression,” says Hazel Markus, social psychologist and professor of behavioral sciences at Stanford University.

Why? Partly because being part of the social organization is a core tenet of traditional Eastern religions. “All of them foster an idea that a person is not a whole, but a part, and only becomes whole in connection with others,” says Markus. “The fundamental, ontological understanding of what a person is is as a node in a network.”

Some Questions from David Berlinksi about Scientism - From Justin Taylor

David Berlinski—a secular Jew who is a philosopher and mathematician and is agnostic about God—asks and answers some questions in The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions (2011):

Has anyone provided a proof of God’s inexistence?

Not even close.

Has quantum cosmology explained the emergence of the universe or why it is here?

Not even close.

Have the sciences explained why our universe seems to be fine-tuned to allow for the existence of life?

Not even close.

Are physicists and biologists willing to believe in anything so long as it is not religious thought?

Close enough.

Has rationalism in moral thought provided us with an understanding of what is good, what is right, and what is moral?

Not close enough.

Has secularism in the terrible twentieth century been a force for good?

Not even close to being close.

Is there a narrow and oppressive orthodoxy of thought and opinion within the sciences?

Close enough.

Does anything in the sciences or in their philosophy justify the claim that religious belief is irrational?

Not even ballpark.

Is scientific atheism a frivolous exercise in intellectual contempt?

Dead on.

From Justin Taylor 

One of the Top 5 Foreign Policy Lessons Learnt from the Past 20 Years

No. 3: The only thing worse than a bad state is no state.

U.S. foreign-policy elites routinely blame foreign-policy problems on the supposedly evil or illegitimate nature of other governments. In this view, international politics isn't a clash of competing interests; it is a morality play between good states -- America and its allies -- and bad states, or anyone who disagrees with us. During the Cold War, the problem was revolutionary communism led by the evil Soviet empire. After the Cold War, the United States blamed trouble on various "rogue" states such as Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria, North Korea, and Serbia. These states were bad because they were dictatorships and had poor human rights records, revisionist aims, and, in most cases, an appetite for weapons of mass destruction. The obvious solution to the rogue-state problem, of course, was regime change: get rid of these very bad rulers and create governments that treat their own populations better and cooperate with the United States. 

But as the sorry results of regime change in Libya and Iraq suggest, getting rid of really awful leaders isn't an improvement if the result is anarchy or a weak, corrupt, and highly divisive regime. One might add Yemen and Somalia to the list as well, and that's where Afghanistan is likely to be once the international community stops propping it up. Creating effective governments in post-totalitarian societies turns out to be very, very hard, and especially after a violent overthrow. It is even harder when the society in question is divided and relatively poor, and the lack of any legitimate or effective authority creates power vacuums in which the worst sorts of extremism can flourish. What's the lesson for all you unrepentant regime-changers out there? Be careful what you wish for.

The rest at Foreign Policy 

"Richard Dawkins, what on earth happened to you?" - The Guardian

From the Guardian

"This is Dawkins in 2014: a figure of mockery, a man so convinced that he possesses God-like powers of omniscience that he can’t understand why everyone’s getting angry at him for pointing out the obvious. Why won’t we all just learn how to think, damn it! Then we could all live together in a peaceful society where nobody wears “bin liners”, and women shut up about sexual harassment... 

Sure, he wrote some pop science books back in the day, but why do we keep having him on TV and in the newspapers? If it’s a biologist you’re after, or a science communicator, why not pick from the hundreds out there who don’t tweet five or six Islamophobic sentiments before getting off the toilet in the morning? If you need an atheist, there are many philosophers, scholars of religion, and public intellectuals available who don’t refuse to acknowledge the existence of theology. 

Dawkins has been arrogant for years, a man so convinced of his intellectual superiority that he believes the one domain in which he happens to be an expert, science, is the only legitimate way of acquiring or assessing knowledge. All of his outbursts in recent years follow from this belief: he understands the scientific method, a process intended to mitigate the interference of human subjectivity in data collection, as a universally applicable way of understanding not just the physical world but literally everything else as well. Hence his constant complaint that those appalled by his bigoted vituperations are simply offended by clarity; feeble-minded obscurantists who cling to emotion, tradition or the supernatural to shield themselves from the power of his truth bombs. 

You don’t have to be religious to find this level of hubris baffling. In his review of The God Delusion, Terry Eagleton remarks: 

Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. 

Dawkins’ narrowmindedness, his unshakeable belief that the entire history of human intellectual achievement was just a prelude to the codification of scientific inquiry, leads him to dismiss the insights offered not only by theology, but philosophy, history and art as well."

Irreligion is the opium of the people - G.K Chesterton

"It is only by believing in God that we can ever criticise the Government. Once abolish...God, and the Government becomes the God. That fact is written all across human history... the truth is that irreligion is the opium of the people. Wherever the people do not believe in something beyond the world, they will worship the world. But, above all, they will worship the strongest thing in the world."

G.K Chesterton

R.C Sproul on Church Membership

What happens is that people observe church members sinning. They reason within themselves, “That person professes to be a Christian.Christians aren’t supposed to sin. That person is sinning; therefore, he is a hypocrite.” The unspoken assumption is that a Christian is one who claims he does not sin. It reality just the opposite is the case. For a Christian to be a Christian, he must first be a sinner. Being a sinner is a prerequisite for being a church member. The Christian church is one of the few organizations in the world that requires a public acknowledgement of sin as a condition for membership. In one sense the church has fewer hypocrites than any institution because by definition the church is a haven for sinners. If the church claimed to be an organization of perfect people then her claim would be hypocritical. But no such claim is made by the church. There is no slander in the charge that the church is full of sinners. Such a statement would only compliment the church for fulfilling her divinely appointed task.

- R. C Sproul via Challies.com

Dealing with Margaret Thatcher's death and funeral

From the Guardian

"...Today is the one day that I will not be demonstrating or turning my back. For Thatcher and I share that final description: both of us failed, both in need of forgiveness. Its the ultimate human solidarity. And while I recognise that many find the language of sin and judgment increasingly uncongenial, it is nonetheless for precisely this reason that it is such a theological mistake to use her funeral as an occasion for grand political theatre, inviting comparisons with Winston Churchill. As the Habsburg funerals recognised, none of that makes any difference in the ultimate scheme of things.

Without God, final judgment becomes the domain of the crowd and the newspapers. I once asked the former archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, what he really wanted to say to Robert Mugabe before his trip to Zimbabwe, back in 2010. The archbishop looked up from his drink, and dropped his voice: "There is no immunity from prosecution when you are dead," he said. And no, this column is not deliberately putting Margaret Thatcher in the company of thieves and dictators to make a political point. I'm putting us all in that company to make a theological one."

- From Giles Fraser, "How to bury Margaret Thatcher"