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.

–– ADVERTISEMENT ––

ENLARGE

THE TWILIGHT OF THE AMERICAN ENLIGHTENMENT

By George Marsden
(Basic, 219 pages, $26.99)

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.

Can Lawrence Krauss answer why there is something instead of nothing?

The Colbert Report
Get More: Comedy Central

From Physicist George Ellis who co-wrote a book with Stephen Hawking answering the question can Lawrence Krauss answer why there is something instead of nothing

Certainly not. He is presenting untested speculative theories of how things came into existence out of a pre-existing complex of entities, including variational principles, quantum field theory, specific symmetry groups, a bubbling vacuum, all the components of the standard model of particle physics, and so on. He does not explain in what way these entities could have pre-existed the coming into being of the universe, why they should have existed at all, or why they should have had the form they did. And he gives no experimental or observational process whereby we could test these vivid speculations of the supposed universe-generation mechanism. How indeed can you test what existed before the universe existed? You can’t.

Thus what he is presenting is not tested science. It’s a philosophical speculation, which he apparently believes is so compelling he does not have to give any specification of evidence that would confirm it is true. Well, you can’t get any evidence about what existed before space and time came into being. Above all he believes that these mathematically based speculations solve thousand year old philosophical conundrums, without seriously engaging those philosophical issues. The belief that all of reality can be fully comprehended in terms of physics and the equations of physics is a fantasy. As pointed out so well by Eddington in his Gifford lectures, they are partial and incomplete representations of physical, biological, psychological, and social reality.

And above all Krauss does not address why the laws of physics exist, why they have the form they have, or in what kind of manifestation they existed before the universe existed (which he must believe if he believes they brought the universe into existence). Who or what dreamt up symmetry principles, Lagrangians, specific symmetry groups, gauge theories, and so on? He does not begin to answer these questions. It’s very ironic when he says philosophy is bunk and then himself engages in this kind of attempt at philosophy.

From Scientific American

"...When I mentioned Ellis’s critique to Krauss, he claimed that Ellis, although once a physicist, is now a “theologian.” Ellis, a Quaker, has indeed written about religion, among other topics, but he is renowned for his work as a physicist. He co-wrote with Stephen Hawking the classic work The Large-Scale Structure of Spacetime, published in 1973. Just in the past five years, Ellis, now 76, has edited one book on quantum gravity and co-written another on cosmology and has co-written more than a dozen papers on physics, according to his website..."