Tuesday: Hili dialogue

August 1, 2017 • 6:30 am

It’s August! It’s August! August 1, 2017, and I am not really excited, for it means that summer is slipping by, and even though I’m long past the age of schooling, it was on this date that I began to feel queasy when I was a child. It was to buy new clothes and notebooks, and the thought of no fun and loads of homework loomed. And just as many of us still have the dreaded “final exam” dream years after college, so the specter of August still haunts us. August 1 is also National Raspberry Cream Pie Day, but never having seen one of these strange beasts, I’ll move on to note that it’s Yorkshire Day in England. In honor of that, here’s the famous Monty Python sketch, “Four Yorkshire Men”. (Not being familiar with Yorkshire, I’ll ask for a Brit to tell us what the stereotype is being mockd.)

On this day in 1774, British researcher Joseph Priestley discovered oxygen, or rather rediscovered it, for the German-Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele had found it earlier but never published his findings. Exactly sixty years later, the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 took effect, outlawing slavery throughout the British Empire. On August 1, 1936, “Hitler’s Olympics” opened in Berlin, famously starring a black man, Jesse Owens, who won four gold medals, greatly discomfiting the Führer. On this day in 1944, as Soviet troops approached Warsaw, the Polish Underground began the Warsaw Uprising against the Germans. Sadly, they were crushed, and it’s said that the Soviets held back entering the city to allow the Germans to destroy a group of Poles who might have resisted Soviet occupation. On this day in 1966, Charles Whitman, having climbed atop “The Tower” on the University of Texas campus in Austin, shot and killed 16 people before he was killed by police. And on August 1, 2008, a terrible series of mishaps on the mountain K2 killed eleven climbers.

Notables born on this day include Francis Scott Key, lyricist for the U.S. national anthem (1779), Herman Melville (1819), Eric Shipton (1907), evolutionist W. D. Hamilton (1936), Jerry Garcia (1942), and a bunch of athletes who I don’t know. Those who died on this day include Calamity Jane (1903), Francis Gary Powers (1977), Corazon Aquino (2009), and Cilla Black (2015). Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the Princess exercises her major obsession:

Hili: We have no alternative.
A: To doing what?
Hili: To retreating in the direction of the refrigerator.
In Polish:
Hili: Nie mamy alternatywy.
Ja: W jakiej sprawie?
Hili: W sprawie wycofania się w pobliże lodówki.

It’s been hot out in Winnipeg, and Gus spends a lot of time snoozing and sprawling outdoors:

Heather Hastie sent this tw**t, saying that “it’s better than kittens.” She might be right, but only as a photo:

https://twitter.com/planetepics/status/891949814929399809

. . .but she added a cat one, too:

https://twitter.com/planetepics/status/892170018309406720

Scuba diver visits same fish daily–for 25 years!

July 31, 2017 • 3:15 pm

If you can have your heart warmed by a fish, or rather a relationship between a man and a fish, have a look at this video and the brief notes about it (below) posted on Twisted Sifter. The fish is an Asian sheepshead wrasse, Semicossyphus reticulatus. 

These Two Have Seen Each Other Nearly Every Day for the Past 25 Years

Scuba diver Hiroyuki Arakawa and Yoriko are the unlikeliest of friends. While they both share a love for the sea, Yoriko’s gills and tail make her a little more aquatically inclined. Nearly every day for the past 25 years, Arakawa has been diving into the waters of Hasama Underwater Park in Tateyama, Japan, to visit Yoriko—an Asian sheepshead wrasse. One day, Arakawa found her looking exhausted and carrying an injury. So he did what any friend would do: he took care of Yoriko, feeding her crabs and nursing her back to health. Their decades-long friendship is proof there’s no greater bond than the one between man and fish.

The Atlas Obscura adds this:

The diver, Hiroyuki Arakawa, has long served as the de facto caretaker for an underwater Shinto shrine, and it is through these dives that he met Yoriko, an Asian sheepshead wrasse, over 25 years ago.

The pair’s relationship soon blossomed into a full-blown friendship. Now, whenever Arakawa visits the shrine, he need only knock on a piece of a metal, and Yoriko immediately speeds over. In the video, Arakawa can be seen kissing Yoriko. His Facebook page is also full of selfies of the unlikely duo.

I wouldn’t have thought such a relationship with a wild animal likely, at least for me, although of course I’ve deeply bonded with the cats I’ve had. But since I’ve been taking care of a duck family (now down to a single hen), my perspective has changed. When you spend hours with a single animal, or a family of them, you begin to bond with them in pretty strong ways. Who would have thought I’d be so deeply enmeshed in the fate of a duck family? They’re ducks, not cats!

But now I can spend a long time just sitting by the pond and staring at a single duck who floats nearby, hoping for a handout—or maybe even getting solace from my presence. I wonder what it’s thinking and can’t possibly know, but am happy to realize it regards me as a friend and not a predator. I eventually see them as creatures of great dexterity and beauty rather than as funny floating birds. I learn about their adaptations: their extreme attentiveness to the environment, the deep maternal instincts of the mother, the ducklings’ reaction to cues from mom that I can’t even discern, and their ability to “dabble”, skillfully diving and retrieving the tiniest bits of food.

We keep each other company. And sometimes she cocks her little duck head sideways, looking at me with one upturned eye as if to say, “Is it really you?” Or so I like to think.

I worry about the ducks’ fates when they fly away, and am sad knowing that I’ll never see them again. Or, if I do, I know I won’t recognize them. But as a friend said, if they do return to my little pond and I don’t know them, they’ll still remember me.

So now I can totally understand the relationship between Arakawa and Yoriko. There are rewards from befriending a nonhuman animal that you just can’t get from a member of our own species. A life without human companionship is empty, but any life is immensely enriched by friendship with a wild animal.

Scaramucci deep-sixed; can things get any worse in the White House?

July 31, 2017 • 2:26 pm

The Washington Post just reported that, after only ten days on the job, Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci has been fired—at the request of Chief of Staff John Kelly (and surely with Drumpf’s approval).

Scaramucci’s brief tenure in the role had been marked by turmoil as he feuded publicly with former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus. Scaramucci’s arrival at the White House prompted former press secretary Sean Spicer to resign in protest.

The abrupt decision signals that Kelly is moving quickly to assert control over the West Wing, which has been characterized by interpersonal disputes and power struggles during Trump’s six months in office.

The retired Marine general, who was sworn in Monday morning, was brought into the White House in the hope that he will bring military-style disciple to Trump’s staff. He has been fully empowered by the president to make significant changes to the organization, White House officials and outside advisers said.

Can the chaos of the Trump administration—the kneejerk policy decisions, the ever-changing parade of officials, the unhinged tweets, and the failure to do anything substantive, much less salubrious—get any worse? I lived through the Nixon and Reagan administrations, and have seen lots of incompetence and lies in the White House, but nothing’s even come close to this. I just hope that some of those who voted for Trump are starting to see what a monster they created, or rather put into power.

Sam Shepard died

July 31, 2017 • 1:00 pm

I’m sad to report that actor and playwright Sam Shepard died Thursday at his home in Kentucky. He was just 73, but was the victim of ALS, a horribly cruel disease. (His death was, I believe, just announced today.)

Shepard wrote 44 plays (one of which, “Buried Child” won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1979) and appeared in numerous movies. Two of my favorite performances are his portrayal of Chuck Yeager in the movie “The Right Stuff” (he was nominated for a best supporting actor Oscar for that one, but didn’t win) and his portrayal of the rich farmer in the underrated but beautiful movie “Days of Heaven.” He also co-wrote another good film, “Paris, Texas”, as well the screenplay for 13 other films.

Here’s a clip of Shepard as Yeager in “The Right Stuff,” an excellent movie. In this scene, after a test pilot’s funeral, Yeager sees the Bell X-1, the ship in which he’d be the first pilot to break the sound barrier:

 

 

Banned in Boston: Activists try to shut down a show by a white artist who painted a scene of black tragedy

July 31, 2017 • 11:30 am

In April I wrote a bit about the painting below, “Open Casket”, which depicts the body of Emmett Till, a black youth who was murdered on a visit to  Mississippi in 1955. He supposedly whistled at a white woman, which turned out to be a lie, but for that he was tortured and killed by two white men, who were tried and acquitted. He was just 14.

Till’s mother had his body brought back to Chicago, where he lived, and insisted on an open-casket funeral so people could see how brutally his body had been battered. You can see a link to one photo in my earlier post, which was published in the black magazine Jet. It is a sad and horrible tale that helped galvanize the Civil Rights movement.

I find the painting moving, but it turned out that the artist, Dana Schutz, made a big mistake: she was born white. She was demonized for taking on a sensitive and “iconic” black subject, for profiting from the pain of black people (she’s not selling the painting), and for being guilty of cultural appropriation and even racism. There were protests at the Whitney Biennial Exhibition when “Open Casket” was shown.

The painting stayed at the Whitney’s exhibit, and the attacks on Schutz, which included people standing in front of the painting wearing tee shirts with slogans on the back, continued. One black artist, Hannah Black, said this:

… it is not acceptable for a white person to transmute Black suffering into profit and fun, though the practice has been normalized for a long time. Although Schutz’s intention may be to present white shame, this shame is not correctly represented as a painting of a dead Black boy by a white artist — those non-Black artists who sincerely wish to highlight the shameful nature of white violence should first of all stop treating Black pain as raw material. The subject matter is not Schutz’s; white free speech and white creative freedom have been founded on the constraint of others, and are not natural rights. The painting must go.

Schutz responded civilly but forcefully:

“I don’t know what it is like to be black in America, but I do know what it is like to be a mother. Emmett was Mamie Till’s only son. The thought of anything happening to your child is beyond comprehension. […] It is easy for artists to self-censor. To convince yourself to not make something before you even try. There were many reasons why I could not, should not, make this painting … (but) art can be a space for empathy, a vehicle for connection.”

As I said in my post, I have no patience with people who criticized Schutz for this painting, or for those who say that only black people can artistically depict black misery. If you follow that line of thinking, it leads to balkanization of the arts as well as politics. . . and madness.

The squabble over Schutz’s “right” to even paint this subject continued, and now have reached the boiling point again. As The Daily Beast reports (see their earlier account here, the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in Boston has planned a solo exhibition by Schutz, which includes 17 paintings and 4 drawings—but not “Open Casket” (there’s to be a placard discussing the painting). And black activists, who are still incensed, are trying to get the show canceled.

The protestors met for three hours with the exhibition’s curator, Eva Respini, and other members of the ICA, and then wrote an open letter airing their grievances against Schutz.  You can read the letter at the link, but here are a few excerpts. Its main goal is to get the ICA to cancel the show and then admit guilt, effectively punishing Schutz (and the ICA) for “transgression” (emphases from the letter):

We were hoping to hear the ICA resist the narrative that Black people can be sacrificed for the greater good. The exhibition going up as described at the meeting would continue the historical narrative that it is worth the suffering of communites most afflicted by continued state and culturally sanctioned racialized violence.

. . .While you spoke to cultural responsibility, we find the planned steps to address the painting to be lacking and in fact justifying the exhibition and thereby minimizing the implications of grave, cultural harm. We understand that the painting itself will not be shown and its exclusion is to be addressed as a wall label. We don’t find this sufficient. Indeed, it is clear the institution stands to gain by virtue of its absence. Even though the painting will not be shown, even in its absence, backing its artist without accountability nor transparency about proceeds from the exhibition, the institution will be participating in condoning the coopting of Black pain and showing the art world and beyond that people can co‐opt sacred imagery rooted in oppression and face little consequence, contributing to and perpetuating centuries‐old racist iconography that ultimately justifies state and socially sanctioned violence on Black people.

and (it’s much longer than this):

The ICA did not acknowledge how such culturally sanctioned violent iconography condones, offers impunity to, and escalates anti‐Black and racialized violence. You told us that you look at your artists as a community you serve and are accountable to. This begins to immunize the artist from accountability by institutional sanction. It tries to equate the responsibility institutions have to a (tax‐paying) public versus one to promote an artist to make mutually beneficial profit. It is a position that denies that the institution can enforce measures to have the artist be accountable. It chooses the artist over the communities the institution serves. Just as a bank would withdraw its credit when clients cannot keep to their original contract, a cultural institution has more power than the ICA is willing to concede. This denial of power and subsequent impunity from accountability sets a dangerous precedent in our contemporary world ‐ one that continues in the tradition of applying cultural power to protect offending white femmes who perpetrate violence against Black communities. [JAC: Last sentence has my emphasis.]

I find this bullying, offensive, and racist. It accuses Schutz, whose intentions were good, of being an “offending white femme who perpetrates violence against black communities”, and the painting of causing “grave cultural harm”and “coopting Black pain.”

Much as I try to see what truth lies in these accusations, I can’t find any—except that the protestors are offended that a white “femme” would portray a black subject that was a horrible tragedy and painful to African Americans. Well, Schutz has explained her reasons, and they’re convincing.  Still, the protestors would like, as Regressives are wont to do, for Schutz to be demonized, boycotted, and vilified for her entire life for making that painting.

At the end of the letter, the protestors make four demands, including a public apology by the ICA and an accusatory on-site “discussion” at which the curator and artist Schutz must be present to get yelled at. (Shades of the Cultural Revolution!) And, finally, there’s the usual claim that this isn’t about censorship, even though the censorship they really do want applies to a painting that isn’t even there:

Please pull the show. This is not about censorship. This is about institutional accountability, as the institutions working with the artist are even now not acknowledging that this nation is not an even playing field. During this violent climate, to show true accountability, we need institutions to go bold. We need them to move from side panels to action. We need them to channel the courage of the editors of Jet Magazine in publishing the photos on September 15, 1955, as Mrs. Mamey Till Mobley asked of them. We need them to go bold and not back down from fear of losing funders and enraging the fury of the current executive administration against arts funding. When institutions take action, they allow other insƟtuƟons to take action. You are not alone. The people will stand with you.

The ICA has caved in some ways to the demonstrators’ demands, and I think they were a bit cowardly in their response (see the Daily Beast article). But the show will go on, and Schutz continues to be civil. As the Daily Beast reported:

Schutz said that while she knew her depiction of Till might stir up controversy, she didn’t anticipate calls for it to be destroyed or removed from the Whitney Biennial. Asked if art should ever be censored, Schutz said no. But she encourages debate over works like hers. “People have a right to their outrage,” she said. “Public discussion and argument is important and essential for art.”

Yes, the protestors have a right to protest, though I don’t think they have a right to disrupt the ICA exhibition. But I find this fracas unbelievable—more unbelievable than the original protest, for the offending painting isn’t on view. But never mind. Schutz has proven herself ideologically impure, and for that she must suffer for the rest of her life.

I keep thinking what Martin Luther King Jr. would have to say about all this, and my feeling is he’d say that what counts is the content of the painting, not the color of the artist’s skin. But of course King’s philosophy has long ceased to be a part of civil rights activism.

h/t: BJ

National Review pronounces the death of New Atheism

July 31, 2017 • 9:00 am

 National Review, founded in 1955 by William F. Buckley, Jr., was a widely read magazine—probably the most important such organ for American conservatives. It has an online version, and I really should be reading it (all of us should read at least one site or magazine that opposes our own philosophy); it came to my attention only when it took out after me for my views on infant euthanasia.

Now, in a section called “The Corner”, which Wikipedia characterizes as representing “a select group of the site’s editors and affiliated writers”, there’s an interesting atheist-bashing piece,”What ever happened to the New Atheists?“, that makes three points, two of them half right and one dead wrong. Total evaluation: 1/3, or 33%, correct. Here are their points (in bold) and below them my responses; the article’s quotes are indented in my discussion:

1.) New Atheism is dead since it’s been rejected by both ends of the political spectrum.

2.) New Atheists are rejected by the Left because they criticize Islam, something that offends Leftist sentiments that favor the underdog and people of color.

3.) New Atheists are rejected by the Right because their arguments against God are silly and superficial.

Let’s take these one by one:

1.) There really isn’t a New Atheist movement; what we have are some people, like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and so on, who have gained renown (or, in the eyes of many, infamy).  What distinguishes New Atheists from Old Atheists is said to be that the former are anti-theistic: they explicitly criticize religion instead of keeping their nonbelief to themselves, and they give public talks and write bestselling books.

But the claim that anti-theism is dead is simply wrong; there are many people who criticize religion, and there’s plenty of evidence they’ve been effective rather than moribund. First, look at the testimony on Dawkins’s “Converts Corner“, which has 159 pages of individuals’ testimony on how Richard Dawkins not only helped people to accept evolution, but also to abandon their faith. These are more than just anecdotes: they’re data destroying the claim that Dawkins’s supposed “stridency” has actually prevented people from becoming nonbelievers. In contrast, there is not a jot or tittle of evidence for the claim that the New Atheists have, by their stridency, actually prevented “deconversion”, or hardened people in their rejection of evolution; there is no “Anti-converts Corner.”

And, as we know, America is becoming more secular over time; the religious believers who run the National Review are in the ever-waning minority. We can debate how much of this is due to the inevitable loss of faith in a progressing Western society (see Pinker’s “The Better Angels of our Nature”), but I’m pretty sure that bestelling books like Dawkins’s “The God Delusion”, “The End of Faith” and “God is Not Great” helped this along, for many people cite these works as pivotal in destroying their religious belief.

But anti-theism is not new: many “Old Atheists”, like Robert Ingersoll, H. L. Mencken, Mark Twain, Bertrand Russell, and even Carl Sagan, were antitheistic.

At any rate, I don’t see “New Atheism” as a real movement. Yes, there are atheist meetings, but most of the organizations that actually accomplish things beyond mutually reinforcing nonbelief are secular and humanist organizations, and aren’t strongly anti-theistic. If “New Atheism” consists simply of its major exponents like Dawkins, Harris, and the late Chrisopher Hitchens, then it’s not a movement, but a collection of a few individuals.  If they vanished, anti-theism would remain. There are plenty of non-famous antitheists, for I’ve met them. These people, because they don’t have a public forum, are not demonized by the Left and have not been rejected by the Left. When people say that “New Atheism is dead”, they simply mean that its major figures have been vilified. That does not mean they’ve been ineffective, because they still pack meetings and talks, and their books remain best sellers. They are far more effective than the “non-strident” atheists who spend their time accusing New Atheists of white supremacy, racism, and misogyny (false accusations, by the way).

Now it is true that the major New Atheists have been demonized, with the possible exception of Dan Dennett: National Review says “The only actual philosopher of the bunch, [Dennett] is far too boring and ponderous to be noticed, let alone denounced, by anyone”. But that slur on Dennett is false. He’s neither boring nor unpopular!

It was inevitable that there would be criticisms of the New Atheists, for much of the “Silent Left” has a sneaking sympathy with religion, if for no reason other than faith is conceived as keeping the “little people” satisfied. Society, these people say, would fall apart without faith. (That’s false, too: viz., Scandinavia.)

I also feel that beyond this residual respect for religion, the accusations of stridency—along with the deliberate distortion of the words of people like Harris—are helped along by simple jealousy. Much of the criticism of New Atheists comes from those people who have not been successful in gaining the public ear (I won’t name them); and I think they’re simply envious.

2.) National Review is partly right when claiming that the Left has demonized New Atheists because they criticize Islam and see that faith as the most dangerous of going religions. As National Review argues:

Confirmation bias deserves at least a part of the blame. The New Atheists have long harbored an irrational fear of Christianity, but Christophobia doesn’t worry the Left. Combatting Islamophobia, however, is a progressive priority, and so it is noticed and addressed when it strikes.

However, the argument that the liberal obsession with Islamophobia stems from a healthy regard for the status of minorities only goes so far. As Michael Walzer, the socialist intellectual, has written in Dissent, “I frequently come across leftists who are more concerned with avoiding accusations of Islamophobia than they are with condemning Islamist zealotry.” There is a reason, after all, why many Democrats stubbornly and proudly refuse to say the words “Islamic terrorism,” preferring to speak of generalized “extremism.”

. . . New Atheism pleased the Left as long as it stuck to criticizing “God,” who was associated with the beliefs of President George W. Bush and his supporters. It was thus fun, rather than offensive, for Bill Maher to call “religion” ridiculous, because he was assumed to be talking about Christianity. Christopher Hitchens could call God a “dictator” and Heaven a “celestial North Korea,” and the Left would laugh. Berkeley students would not think to disinvite Richard Dawkins when he was saying “Bush and bin Laden are really on the same side: the side of faith and violence against the side of reason and discussion.”

Where the piece goes wrong is equating the Left as a whole with the Regressive Left. The latter folks do criticize people like Dawkins and Harris, but remain atheists. Yet there are plenty of Leftists who don’t criticize “New Atheism”, and it’s a flaw in the article that it doesn’t make the distinction between the Progressive and the Regressive Left. Also, while much of the vilification of New Atheist “leaders” comes from misguided Regressives who feel they’re virtuously protecting Muslims of color by attacking criticism of Islam, a lot of the public criticism is based on jealousy (indeed, Michael Ruse had admitted that he’s jealous, and that his books don’t sell as well as Dawkins’s.) Accusations of bigotry are confected to support the critics, leading to claims, always given without data, that women and ethnic minorities used to be fine with New Atheism but have left the “movement” in droves.

The unholy confluence between the progressive Left and the Right in criticizing Islam is real, but stems from different motives. The right doesn’t like Islam because it’s not Christianity, and because Muslims are said to endanger the American way of life. The Left doesn’t like Islam because it is both regressive and theocratic, and, for many adherents, promotes values inimical to social equality. (There is some agreement by both sides on the dangers that Islam poses to democracy.)

But this claim about why New Atheists are rejected by the Left is largely true, so long as we’re talking about the Regressive Left.

3.) The arguments of New Atheists against god and religion are neither superficial nor wrong; they’re based largely on a lack of evidence for the tenets of religious belief. The way National Review defends religion (they are, after all, conservative) is both interesting and familiar. They claim that New Atheists ignore Sophisticated Theology; that we don’t need evidence for God because it’s self evident; and that there is evidence for God in the “first cause argument”. I quote at length:

Truth be told, New Atheism was always fundamentally unserious. It does not even try to address the theistic arguments for the existence of God. Indeed, philosopher A.C. Grayling insists that atheists should not even bother with theology because they “reject the premise.” Our new “rationalists,” it turns out, will not even evaluate arguments that do not conform to their prejudices. Battering a fundamentalist straw-man with an equally fundamentalist materialism, New Atheism is one big category error. Over and over, its progenitors demand material proof for the existence of God, as if He were just another type of thing — a teacup, or perhaps an especially powerful computer. This confusion leads the New Atheists to favor the rather elementary infinite-regress argument: If God created everything, then who created God? But as the theologian David Bentley Hart replies:

“[God is] not a ‘supreme being,’ not another thing within or alongside the universe, but the infinite act of being itself, the one eternal and transcendent source of all existence and knowledge, in which all finite being participates. . . . Only a complete failure to grasp the most basic philosophical terms of the conversation could prompt this strange inversion of logic, by which the argument from infinite regress—traditionally and correctly regarded as the most powerful objection to pure materialism—is now treated as an irrefutable argument against belief in God.”

This is just an attempt to immunize religious belief against disproof by redefining god as “the infinite act of being”, but also to say that there simply has to be “a transcendent source of all existence and knowledge” because of the First Cause Argument.  Well, we already know the fallacies of the Infinite Regress (one being “Where did God come from?”), and the rest is the kind of gaseous piffle that Hart is prone to emit. And of course “New Atheists” do attack the theistic arguments for God’s existence; see “The God Delusion” or my own book, “Faith Versus Fact.”

The article continues:

The rest of the New Atheists’ arguments can be handled even more quickly. Dawkins sees God as a complex superbeing subject to natural evolution and then deems him to be statistically improbable. He may be right, but why he thinks he has in the process critiqued anything resembling “religion” is beyond me. Dennett, who endeavors mainly to show that religion is a natural phenomenon, seems to confuse his validation of a religious claim with its refutation. Hitchens offers no real argument and plenty of historical inaccuracies. He is generally content to list the bad deeds of believers, explain away or ignore the good deeds of other believers, and then pretend that he has somehow disproven Christianity. Harris, to quote David Bentley Hart once more, “declares all dogma pernicious, except his own thoroughly dogmatic attachment to nondualistic contemplative mysticism, of a sort which he mistakenly imagines he has discovered in one school of Tibetan Buddhism, and which (naturally) he characterizes as purely rational and scientific.”

This itself is a superficial and misleading analysis. If there’s one thing that really distinguishes New Atheism from Old Atheism, it’s the influence of science on the former. New Atheists say, “Where’s the  evidence that your religious beliefs are true, as opposed to the beliefs of other faiths?”

It is a perfectly valid critique of religion to ask “What’s the evidence for your truth claims?”, for at bottom all religions—save perhaps the numinous species espoused by people like Hart—are based on claims about reality.  If those claims are wrong—if Jesus wasn’t crucified and resurrected, if an angel didn’t dictate the Qur’an to Muhammad, if Joseph Smith didn’t really find those golden plates—then religion is based in lies and fairy tales. And where’s the convincing evidence for a divine being, one that takes a benevolent interest in our species?

That is a perfectly valid line of criticism, and one that National Review ignores. If religious truth claims are false, then religions are false, even though they usually come with a moral code that may be partly salubrious. Yet you can have an even better moral code without gods, and atheists—New and Old alike—do.

If New Atheism is really dead, why does it refuse to lie down? Religion will eventually go away, with a few pockets of resistance, and we see this happening before our eyes in poll after poll. People like David Bentley Hart and the editors of National Review may remain, bawling their faith in the wilderness, but the rest of us will find our solace in rationality rather than fairy tales.

Readers’ wildlife photos (and video)

July 31, 2017 • 7:30 am

Today we have a potpourri of miscellaneous photos (and one video).

Tara Tanaka sends a specimen of my favorite genre of animal videos: newborn ducklings leaping into the water from their elevated nest. These are wood ducks (Aix sponsa), and there are only two this time (but see below). Here are Tara’s video notes (be sure to watch the video on the site, and Tara’s Vimeo channel is here):

She probably would have brought her babies out sooner, but it took me about ten minutes to get a water snake out of my blind before I could set up the cameras. As soon as I was in the blind with both cameras, I saw her dive back in the box. I think she was just about to call them out when I made my first trip to the blind, but my extended presence delayed her plans. She brought them out just 15 minutes after I’d gone back in the house.

As she sat in the entrance, performing her final “predator check,” you can see her talking to her ducklings. As soon as she dropped to the water and checked the area under the box, she called them out. I was very surprised that there were only two – it’s by far the smallest brood I’ve ever seen. There was one unhatched egg left in the box. I speeded up the video 20x after both babies had jumped until the time that they disappeared from view of the camera. I think they are eating insects from the vegetation as she zig-zags them to a safer location.

She has her work cut out for her 24/7 for at least the next 60 days until those little babies are flying. She’s probably glad to have a different view than the inside of a wooden box – her view for the last 30 days. Good luck little family!!

Tara adds this, so stay tuned!

This morning I looked out the window and saw a Black-bellied Whistling Duck on top of a box looking as if he was looking for predators, so I took the camera out on the back porch (it was threatening rain) and let it run.   When I reviewed the card, the pair had brought out 20 (!) babies. MORE video to follow next week

Reader Tony Eales from Australia sent some photos of mimicry:

Another ant-mimicking jumping spider. This one is from a monotypic genus that was discovered only in 1999. The “common” name is given on www.arachne.org.au as Judy and Alan’s Yellow Ant-mimicking Spider, which is charming if rather long, and probably not that common. The binomial is Judalana lutea; presumably Judy and Alan are commemorated in the genus name. The species of ant that it mimics is one of my favourites, from a small Australasian genus known collectively as “Strobe Ants” because of their rapid jerky random movements. J. lutea is specifically a mimic of the Black-headed Strobe-ant Opisthopsis rufithorax. I love this Latin name too: it’s like a little C.S. Lewis poem.



Here’s the ant it’s said to mimic, Opisthopsis rufithorax:

Reader Tim Anderson, also from Oz, sent a bird photo.

This is a Red Wattlebird (Anthochaera carunculata). It is a common bird in suburban gardens throughout southern Australia and has a distinctive “chukk” call which it emits while pointing its beak straight up.

Finally, a photo from reader Graham, who has a family of four foxes (mom and three kits) hanging about his property.

Just another lazy Sunday afternoon in the garden!