AnimalCams, now with moar falcon!

April 4, 2011 • 1:08 pm

It’s time to return to the peregrines.  Last year we had a whole week about peregrine falcons, but it was marred by the absence of live video feeds—it was too late in the season. Well, the Wisconsin PerigrineCam is back up, and nesting has just begun.  Bookmark it if you’d like to watch these amazing birds rear their young. (Click on the “+” button at lower left to zoom in on the birds.)

Meanwhile, back at EagleCam:

And HummerCam, where the young are now too big to fit in the nest but not quite ready to fly. They sit on the edge while mother comes and goes constantly, cramming her food-filled beak down their gaping maws.

The Dutchman

April 4, 2011 • 9:58 am

This is a lovely but little known song about an old Dutch couple.  It was written by Michael Peter Smith, and the best version, here, is by Steve Goodman. I saw him perform it around 1974 at a coffeehouse in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Goodman, born in 1948, was a Chicago native, a huge Cubs fan, and a semi-major figure on the 70s folk scene. He’s most famous for having written “The City of New Orleans,” a big hit for Arlo Guthrie.

Goodman died of leukemia when he was only 36. One of his last songs was “A Dying Cub Fan’s Last Request“.

Click on the “Watch on YouTube” line.

What does it take to blame religion?

April 4, 2011 • 5:52 am

We’re all familiar with those people who claim that no foul deed, no murder, no injury can be laid at the feet of faith—at least in modern times.  They might grudgingly admit that the Inquisition or the Crusades may have had something to do with faith, but those were the bad old days.  Now things are different.  And while religion may seem to be involved in today’s horrors and evils, when you look deeper, they say, you’ll ultimately find the real causes.  The Protestant/Catholic fracas in Northern Ireland?  A historical squabble—religion was just a “label” for political opponents.  The persecution of Galileo?  A civil and political affair, not involving faith.  The institutionalized slaughter of the Jews during World War II? Well, the Nazis needed a scapegoat somewhere.  The murder of UN workers and Afghanis in last week’s mosque-fuelled riots?  Islam had nothing to do with it: it was simply the effect of lying, manipulative mullahs inflaming a populace who hate the colonialism of America and Europe.

Very often these “excusers” are those also those who argue for the compatibility of science and faith: those who tell critics of religion to shut up because that species of “militancy” drives people from science.  If you feel that you must coddle the faithful to achieve your goals, then you can’t be caught out saying bad things about religion.  It’s much easier to blame politics, the inherent xenophobia of humans, and the like.  People are much less offended when they’re criticized for being, say, Republicans than for being Catholics.  There are anti-defamation leagues for Jews and Catholics, but none for Democrats and Republicans.

Granted, evil actions often stem from a complicated nexus of faith and secular factors.  But I wonder about this: if people say that the root causes of evil in this world are things like xenophobia, politics, colonialism, and the like, why wouldn’t you place faith among them?  After all, to many people faith is far more personal, far more important, than politics.  Many Catholics go to church weekly; many Muslims pray five times a day and read only the Qur’an.  Many people say that their faith is the most important thing in their lives.  And, as I said, people consider it far more insulting to criticize their faith than their politics.  Given this, why wouldn’t faith be responsible for some awful things?  Why is it alone excused from being an impetus of evil?  We all know the reason: belief in belief.

Given our inability to rewind the tape of history, and to do controlled experiments in which we can insert or remove religion like a chemical in a test tube, we’re left with the notion of “reasonable inference”.  And of course people will disagree about what inferences are reasonable, just like they disagree about what evidence for global warming is reasonable.

So I offer a tentative suggestion to identify situations in which religion is “responsible” for evils.  It’s this:

Would those acts have still been committed had there been no religion?

I’m not a philosopher, of course, and this criterion isn’t perfect.  For one thing, it doesn’t mean that religion is the only “cause.”  And there can be other factors, like politics, personality disorders, civil strife, and so on, that are “causes” in the same way: absent the factor, the acts wouldn’t occur.  My criterion is based on what I call the John Lennon Factor (“Imagine no religion”): “Would the amount of evil in the world be reduced if there were no religion?”   And let us not forget that while religion can incite people to violence and murder, the ultimate responsibility for those acts rests on the people who commit them.

Given that criterion, I lay the following “modern” evils at the feet of faith—things that wouldn’t have happened without religion.   There are, of course, many more beyond this list.

  • 9/11
  • The represssion of women according to Islamic law and custom
  • Deaths from AIDS because of Catholic importuning against birth control
  • The sexual molestation of children by Catholic priests
  • The horrible and often lifelong guilt instilled in children by Catholic priests who scare them with thoughts of hell and constant admonitions about sin
  • Ditto for Islam, which threatens apostates and doubters with eternal hellfire
  • The deaths and injuries due to Sunni/Shiite conflict: arguments about who are Mohammed’s true successors.
  • The deaths of children whose parents relied on faith healing
  • The persecution of gays on religious grounds, as occurs in both America and the Middle East
  • The pedophilic marriage customs of some Mormon sects
  • The mutilation by acid of Afghani girls who dare attend school
  • Sexual fear and loathing
  • Blanket prohibitions on abortion even when the mother is raped or her life is at stake; the persecution of single mothers in countries like Ireland
  • Opposition to assisted suicide and euthanasia
  • The fleecing of the innocent by Scientology (if you consider it a religion)
  • And, of course, the opposition to science instantiated in American creationism.  Note that this is among the least harmful effects of faith. Nobody dies because they don’t learn evolution.

I’m sure that readers can add more of these; the point is that these effects are either ignored, minimized, or ascribed to other factors by those whose political strategy requires them to osculate the rump of faith.

h/t: Ophelia Benson, with whom I’ve discussed these issues over the years

Grayling’s secular bible

April 4, 2011 • 2:58 am

Yesterday’s Guardian interviews philosopher Anthony Grayling and describes his newest work, The Good Book: A Secular Bible (a bargain at only $20 from Amazon).

Grayling is almost certainly going to upset a lot of Christians, for what he has written is a secular bible. The Good Book mirrors the Bible in both form and language, and is, as its author says, “ambitious and hubristic – a distillation of the best that has been thought and said by people who’ve really experienced life, and thought about it”. Drawing on classical secular texts from east and west, Grayling has “done just what the Bible makers did with the sacred texts”, reworking them into a “great treasury of insight and consolation and inspiration and uplift and understanding in the great non-religious traditions of the world”. He has been working on his opus for several decades, and the result is an extravagantly erudite manifesto for rational thought.

He has a fair amount to say about nonbelief, which seems to be the Guardian’s main concern. Here he is on “militant” atheism:

. . . the atheist movement has been accused of shooting itself in the foot by adopting a tone so militant as to alienate potential supporters, and fortify the religious lobby. I ask Grayling if he thinks there is any truth in the charge, and he listens patiently and politely to the question, but then dismisses it with a shake of the head.

“Well, firstly, I think the charges of militancy and fundamentalism of course come from our opponents, the theists. My rejoinder is to say when the boot was on their foot they burned us at the stake. All we’re doing is speaking very frankly and bluntly and they don’t like it,” he laughs. “So we speak frankly and bluntly, and the respect agenda is now gone, they can no longer float behind the diaphanous veil – ‘Ooh, I have faith so you mustn’t offend me’. So they don’t like the blunt talking. But we’re not burning them at the stake. They’ve got to remember that when it was the other way around it was a much more serious matter.

“And besides, really,” he adds with a withering little laugh, “how can you be a militant atheist? How can you be militant non-stamp collector? This is really what it comes down to. You just don’t collect stamps. So how can you be a fundamentalist non-stamp collector? It’s like sleeping furiously. It’s just wrong.”

Read more at the Guardian about Grayling’s attitude toward sniffy philosophers who want their field to remain the purview of Ph.D.-carrying academics (sound familiar?), about his childhood in Africa and the murder of his sister, and how he maintains his famous hair (Grayling is England’s answer to Pinker).  And you have to admire the man’s diligence: he’s about my age but this is his thirtieth book.

h/t: Juan

Another EagleCam

April 3, 2011 • 8:40 am

I almost hate to foist this on you, but we’ll need a replacement for HummingbirdCam since those two chicks will soon fledge.

So there is another EagleCam—this one in Decorah, Iowa.  It also has three eggs, and two chicks have just hatched.  The important features of this one are that it operates 24/7 and has infrared video, so you can see the eagles sleeping at night, and it also has sound, so you can hear the birds making noise.  In fact, you can hear the two new chicks making distinctly un-eagle-like peeps.

Here’s a screenshot; you can see that the nest is considerably smaller than the one we’ve been watching.

h/t: Peter

Hoffmann coddles Islam, calls for Pastor Jones’s arrest

April 3, 2011 • 6:31 am

I hate to give blog traffic to R. Joseph Hoffmann, one of the nastier and haughtier instantiations of atheism, but his recent post at The New Oxonian, “Bloody Fools,” raises issues worth discussing—or dismissing.  Hoffmann writes about blasphemy, contrasting P.Z. Myers’s famous “cracker episode”, in which P. Z. skewered a communion wafer and discarded pages of sacred books in the trash, with Pastor Terry Jones’s recent burning of the Qur’an, which triggered Muslim riots in Afghanistan that led to the deaths of 21 people.  Hoffmann dismisses Myers’s actions as a stunt without any conviction behind it:

. . . Myers’ action only succeeded in cementing his hard-crafted persona as a jerk.  And even as a one-off expression of jerkiness, the actions of 2008 did not rise to the standard of blasphemy, which is usually understood as an interreligious act designed to malign or humiliate a religious opposite.  Secular “blasphemy” against religion is more problematical, and Myers’ showpiece proved it. That is because there was no real conviction behind the act.  ”Religion is sooooooo stupid” is not an impressive bumper sticker.  The defense of free speech is only relevant and brave when free speech is actually abridged, not when threats to its exercise are manufactured.

But Hoffmann claims that Jones’s act, because it intended to inflame Muslims, was deadly serious—that Jones, in fact, should be arrested for murder:

Jones is a different story.  A more dangerous one.  He is the ugly Id unchained from the soul of an America I’d hoped had died.  It is moronic, armed, and dangerous.  It does not question the ontological correctness of its religious and political views.  It burns a book in Lake City, Florida, and Muslims (and others) die in Afghanistan and soon Pakistan and elsewhere.  Jones does this knowing they will die, praying to his defective God that they will die, in order to prove his belief that the devil is with us.  He is with us, and he needs to be charged with and convicted of murder.  His name is Terry Jones.

Well, I expect that P.Z. will defend himself soon, but I disagree that there was no real conviction behind his act. Of course there was conviction: the man has criticized religion for years.  Was it “cowardly”, as Hoffman states, for P. Z. to desecrate the Qur’an in Morris, Minnesota but not in Lahore? Not cowardly but prudent—who wants to die that way?  The fact that it’s imprudent to insult Islam in Lahore is not the fault of Myers; it’s the fault of Islam, which is so easily insulted and inflamed.  But more on that in a minute.

You might well argue, as Hoffmann does, that his buring of the Qur’an was likely to cause trouble.  Because it in fact led to murder, should Jones himself be indicted for murder?  I don’t think so, and there are several reasons:

  • First of all, Jones didn’t violate any American laws; his acted was protected by the First Amendment.  He can’t be arrested for murder, so Hoffmann’s call is fatuous.  However, it did inspire the murder of people in Asia.  Does that make him morally culpable?  Maybe just a tad, but not guilty of murder for the following reasons.
  • The act does not fall under the courts’ designation of the type of speech that is not protected: speech that was intended to cause clear and imminent danger.  Jones did not call for murder, nor was he performing his act in front of an inflamed Muslim mob.  Hoffman recounts Jones’s own reasons: he intended “to bring the book to justice for violence and murder ‘it [sic] had perpetrated.’ Unliike Myers, who began with the view that no book is sacred, Jones is of the opinion that Islam’s holyd book and Islam itself is ‘of the devil’.”  Jones’s act is not the equivalent of the classic violation of free speech: falsely shouting “fire” in a crowded theater.  That is expected to cause an immediate riot, but not a riot in which people try to murder others.   Burning a sacred book, even assuming that it might cause trouble, is not the same as standing in front of an inflamed, post-mosque mob and shouting, “Kill the infidels!”
  • There is an obvious upside to permitting both Myers’s and Jones’s act: the protection of ideas, especially unpopular ideas like the criticism of faith.  There’s no similar upside in allowing people to deceive others about fires in theaters.
  • There are far more innocuous acts that also have a reasonable expectation of causing trouble, like Geert Wilders’s and Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s criticism of Islam.  They now need police protection because they’ve “insulted” Islam.  The threats against them were absolutely predictable.  If they are murdered by Muslim extremists, as was Theo van Gogh, are they responsible for their own deaths?
  • In 2005 a Danish newspaper published caricatures of Mohamed that led to Muslim riots and many deaths. Should the editors of the newspaper not only be denied this kind of expression, but also be tried for murder? After all, the riots were just as predictable there as with Pastor Jones’s act.

In all of this Hoffmann misses the real problem, which is not the inimical effects of protected speech, but the fact that Islam is such a violent faith that even the mildest criticism, like naming a teddy bear “Mohamed,” can inflame Muslims and lead to murder.  Sam Harris, in his essay “Losing our spines to save our necks” (reprised in a post on Sam’s new “blog”), hits the nail on the head:

Wilders, like Westergaard and the other Danish cartoonists, has been widely vilified for “seeking to inflame” the Muslim community. Even if this had been his intention, this criticism represents an almost supernatural coincidence of moral blindness and political imprudence. The point is not (and will never be) that some free person spoke, or wrote, or illustrated in such a manner as to inflame the Muslim community. The point is that only the Muslim community is combustible in this way. The controversy over Fitna, like all such controversies, renders one fact about our world especially salient: Muslims appear to be far more concerned about perceived slights to their religion than about the atrocities committed daily in its name. Our accommodation of this psychopathic skewing of priorities has, more and more, taken the form of craven and blinkered acquiescence.

There is an uncanny irony here that many have noticed. The position of the Muslim community in the face of all provocations seems to be: Islam is a religion of peace, and if you say that it isn’t, we will kill you. Of course, the truth is often more nuanced, but this is about as nuanced as it ever gets: Islam is a religion of peace, and if you say that it isn’t, we peaceful Muslims cannot be held responsible for what our less peaceful brothers and sisters do. When they burn your embassies or kidnap and slaughter your journalists, know that we will hold you primarily responsible and will spend the bulk of our energies criticizing you for “racism” and “Islamophobia.”

Pastor Jones is a religious nutcase, and I have no respect for him.  He’s nearly as nuts as Islamic extremists, though I doubt that Jones will be killing anyone.  But he did nothing illegal or, I think, immoral.  I agree with Harris’s conclusion, which is that we need more criticism of Islam, not less.  And not just Islamic extremists, either, but criticism of those Islamic “moderates” who, by refusing to speak up against the violence and insane hypersensitivity of their coreligionists, create a climate in which Islamic extremism is tolerated.

Hoffmann seems to be one of these coddlers too.  Nowhere in his post will you find him indicting the murderers themselves for the murders!  He spends all his time blaming Pastor Jones instead. In fact, he spends more time criticizing atheists (he just can’t resist that) than criticizing the kind of faith that makes people kill:

Re some of his readers’ assertions that Jones and the murderers are “cut from the same cloth”, and that neither is culpable, Hoffman says this:

I find that kind of response both uninformed and worrying. Very worrying coming from nonbelievers, and maybe because it raises in my mind questions about whether a certain level of atheism isn’t also an impediment to moral reasoning–specifically that kind that finds all religions “naturally” guilty of atrocity and hence no one at fault and no one innocent of crimes.

Which atheists, by the way, think that? I don’t know of any.  And there’s this:

Myers’ antics made him the dark darling of full frontal atheists, those who hold to the curious view that the angrier you make people who believe in sacred books and objects, the likelier you are to win over people who hold a weak or no opinion on the subject.

Desecration, confrontation, Yo-mama style insult and blasphemy are tangible blows for reason, the commandos believe.

And, showing his characteristic hauteur, in which he assumes his readers are dumb, Hoffmann adds this:

To my atheist colleagues, I say: please, before you snipe, try to understand.  We are not yet at the point where atheism is the “cure” for anything, least of all for the kinds of violence these acts have made manifest.

When I first read Hoffmann’s piece, I thought that he was offering food for thought. And he did, for we constantly need to rethink the vital issue of free speech, and how or when it should be curtailed.  But on rereading the post I see that it’s also an excuse for Hoffman to attack atheism, to tout his superior wisdom (really, the man is quite arrogant), and, most important, to exculpate Islam. He proffers not a word of criticism of the kind of faith that sees criticism as grounds for slaughter. If Hoffmann thinks that the Muslim murderers themselves were guilty of murder, why didn’t he say so? He lays the whole issue at the feet of Pastor Jones.  That, I think, is simply one more attempt of liberal faitheists to excuse and coddle the Religion of Violence.

The inevitable next step: Hoffmann will appear and assure us that of course he believes that the murderers are guilty of murder—that it was implicit in his post.  But I don’t see it, since he spends all of his time whaling on Jones and Myers.  For an atheist, Hoffmann is curiously reluctant to criticize Islam.

Two books in one!

April 3, 2011 • 4:56 am

Are you old enough to remember these commercials for Certs mints?

I remember them whenever I hear a pastor claim that the Bible was never intended to be a factual account, but nevertheless some parts (those parts chosen at the discretion of the speaker) were.  “The Bible is true!”  “No, it’s just a metaphor!”  “Stop, you’re both right!  It’s two, two,—two two books in one!”

See this argument in a new piece at PuffHo, “Is the Bible true?”, by David Lose, director of the Center for Biblical Preaching at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota:

Both sides, however, miss the literary nature and intent of the Bible as stated within its own pages. Take for example Luke, who in his introduction acknowledges that he is not an eye-witness to the events he recounts but depends on multiple other stories about Jesus. He writes what he calls “an orderly account” so that his audience may believe and trust the teaching they have received (Luke 1:1-4). Or consider John, who near the end of his gospel comes clean about carefully arranging stories of Jesus so as to persuade his readers that Jesus is the messiah (John 20:30-31). The gospels — and, indeed, all of Scripture — do not seek to prove but to persuade. . .

. . . For this reason, the Bible is filled with testimony, witness, confession and even propaganda. Does it contain some reliable historical information? Of that there is little doubt. Yet, whenever we stumble upon “verifiable facts” — a notion largely foreign to ancient writers — we should keep in mind that the biblical authors deployed them not to make a logical argument but rather to persuade their audiences of a larger “truth” that cannot be proved in a laboratory but is finally accepted or not accepted based on its ability to offer a compelling story about the meaning and purpose of the world, God, humanity and everything in between. To attempt to determine whether the Bible is “true” based only on its factual accuracy is therefore to make a profound category mistake, judging its contents by standards its authors were neither cognizant of nor interested in.

Here we see postmodern theology, a fervent attempt to separate “facts” from “truth”.   But when Lose says that the authors of the Bible had a purely “literary merit and intent,” or says something like this:

The gospels — and, indeed, all of Scripture — do not seek to prove but to persuade.

There’s only one response: how do you know?  For two millennia the Bible was taken as literal truth, with the exception of a few theologians who are now touted as having been right all along. And many people still see it as a factual, historical and—indeed—scientific account.  But liberal theologians have changed their minds: it’s largely metaphor—with, of course, the exception of the divinity, virgin birth, and resurrection of Jesus, which remain as ironclad facts.  What has changed?  Only the fact that science has disproven many of the Bible’s “factual” assertions.  Based on this, theologians like Lose now tell us that the Bible was never meant to convey literal truth.

Well, these people are entitled to say that previous theologians were wrong, but they’re not entitled to backtrack and say that the authors of scripture, whoever they were, never intended to produce a literal account.  That’s simply the theological sausage-grinder turning scientific necessities into religious virtues.  Who is supposed to be convinced by this ex post facto rationalization?

And if the Bible is a purely literary vehicle, why not too the accounts of Jesus’s life and death?

Lose’s attempts to force an untenable compromise dismisses the beliefs of millions of scriptural literalists—and atheists—as simply one part of a “false dichotomy”.  How does he know that the dichotomy is “false”?

Clearly there are many ways to answer the question of whether the Bible is true. If you are interested primarily in its factual accuracy, then your options are clear and you might as well pick a side. If, however, you’re interested in a way out of the stalemate and false dichotomy of the present conservative-liberal debate, then you might join Jules in putting the matter differently. When you read the Bible, that is, do you feel God’s touch? Does God get involved?

Doesn’t that remind you of this now-famous cartoon from xkcd?