why scientific critiques of religion miss the point

Richard Dawkins, author of The Blind Watchmaker, spoke yesterday at Swarthmore. I didn't attend the lecture, but read of it through the linked article in Swarthmore's Daily Gazette.

I don't know much about Dawkins's scientific work, so I won't speak to that. But this passage (assuming it accurately describes Dawkin's presentation) betrays a fundamental misunderstanding on the part of Dawkins as to the role played by religion in people's lives.

In discussing tradition, Dawkins pointed out that religion always runs in families. "It's fascinating how whatever religion you're brought up in turns out to be the right one!" he joked. He then showed a newspaper clipping of three children in a Christmas pageant. The caption listed them as a Sikh, a Muslim, and a Christian. "It is grotesque to label four year olds with the religion of their parents," he claimed. To prove this point, he put up another copy of the picture, with the captain changed to "a Keynesian, a monetarist, and a Marxist." While this seems absurd, claimed Dawkins, it is seen as normal and right to put religious labels on children.

There's a fundamental difference between, for example, Islam and monetarism. That difference, as Dawkins himself states, is tradition. Monetarism is based on a set of economic beliefs. While Islam is based on a set of religious beliefs, it also has cultural practices and traditions associated with it. To bring in the case I'm most familiar with... I know several people who strongly identify as Jewish without believing in God. There's no contradiction here, since there's more to being Jewish than accepting the existence of a single God who created the world in six days, spoke to Abraham, etc. For many people, Judaism is about food. For many people, Judaism is about prayers that they enjoy singing, regardless of their meaning. For many people, Judaism is about what you do on various holidays (two fun examples: dressing up in costumes and getting roaring drunk on Purim, going out for Chinese food and a movie on Christmas). The point is that you can be Jewish without believing all the tenets of the Jewish faith. That's where Dawkin's critique of this newspaper caption breaks down.

To restrict religion to its theological underpinnings is to strip it of the cultural richness that people identify with.

johnny hart, at it again

Atrios points out that a recent "B.C." by Johnny Hart is at the center of a furor about religious insensitivity.

The last line in the Washington Post article on the controversy gets it absolutely right. "Otherwise, it's just an unfunny joke." Word. It's just not funny.

I'm sure it's rather difficult to come up with a genuinely amusing punchline every day. But I have to say... "B.C" is consistently unfunny. Cavemen in of themselves aren't funny. You've got to do more with it, preferably something reasonably appropriate of cavemen. Having them make social commentary on modern society is just weird.

and what would you do with seven glasses in front of you?

Via Daily Kos, an article in the Washington Post about how Bush doesn't know etiquette.

Kos pleads for someone to find Bush an etiquette coach.

Look. I'm as critical of Bush as just about anyone out there. But this just isn't the place to criticize him. I couldn't care less whether or not the president knew how to behave in polite society. Good policies and the ability to carry them out effectively are what matters, not the ability to make a toast.

Focus, people. Focus.

well, things do kinda change with time

According to an article originally in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, people are forgetting about the Kennedy assassination. Furthermore, according to this article, this is a Bad Thing.

I can see, of course, why Americans no longer have the same feeling towards the assassination as they did even ten years ago. After all, as Star-Telegram points out, less than half of Americans alive today were alive back in 1963. And in terms of national tragedies, September 11th looms a bit larger in the minds of contemporary Americans than the assassination of a man whose myth has been rather eroded in recent years.

What I can't quite figure out is why there seems to be such a nostalgia for the times when the Kennedy assassination did mean something to the American psyche. Look, national memory changes over time. That's just the way it is. Back in 1963, I'd venture to say that the sinking of the Lusitania didn't really resonate with Americans anymore. Successive generations select the moments that are meaningful to them. To pine away for the cherished moments of the past seems hopelessly naïve.

Most astonishing, though, is this quote. "Some believe that the fascination with Kennedy's death will remain strong because he has become an almost mythical figure whose death represented the end of America's innocence."

What, America was innocent until 1963? All those wars we fought didn't show that the world wasn't all hunky-dory? How about when other presidents were assassinated?

Events aren't significant in of themselves. People attach meaning to events. It's inevitable that those meanings will change over time. America's a drastically different place than it was even five years ago. Why should its collective memory stay the same?

and just like that, a whole new species

This shouldn't be all that surprising, but stuff like this always blows my mind. Japanese researchers have discovered a new species of whale. Now obviously, there's a ton of species that haven't been recognized or described yet. Biology as we know it hasn't been around for all that long. But the vast majority of those species are tiny things.

This is a whale.

Recorded human knowledge has thus far completely missed a forty-foot whale that's been swimming around for eons. If that's not humbling, I don't know what is.

same-sex marriage and slippery slopes

The Masschusetts Supreme Court decision invalidating a ban on same-sex marriage is, obviously, a Good Thing.

What's troubling, besides the absurd "marriage is a sanctified institution and must be protected" (Religion, this is Government. Government, this is Religion. You two should stand in opposite corners of the room) argument is the slippery slope claim put forth, for example, by Eugene Volokh.

To be sure, he's put a lot more thought into slippery slopes than I have. But for him to suggest that the Massachusetts decision could lead directly to decisions legalizing polygamy and marriage between close relatives smacks of ingenuousness. Courts are entirely capable of judging each case on its own merits. Yes, precedence plays a key role in jurisprudence, but it's not everything.

This passage highlights a problem in Volokh's reasoning:

The court reasons that "the right to marry means little if it does not include the right to marry the person of one's choice," but while it qualifies this as "subject to appropriate government restrictions in the interests of public health, safety, and welfare," it's far from clear that a court would find that "health, safety, and welfare" would be hurt by adult polygamous marriages (assuming all existing partners in the marriage consent to the addition of another).

And yet, as Volokh himself points out, footnote 34 of the decision declares that "Nothing in our opinion today should be construed as relaxing or abrogating the consanguinity or polygamous prohibitions of our marriage laws." This footnote explicitly eliminates the slippery slope Volokh is talking about.

This isn't to say, of course, that a pro-polygamy or pro-incestuous marriage lobby couldn't bring forth arguments to extend the freedom of choice guaranteed to homosexual relationships in this decision. But those arguments would be evaluated on their own merits and failings. It doesn't appear at all evident to me that this decision necessarily provides the space in which those arguments would be persuasive.

There's a reason slippery slope arguments are considered fallacious, after all.

clark on fox

Plenty of others in the blogosphere have already linked to this, but it's something everyone should see.

Wesley Clark goes to town on a Fox News anchor. This is vitriole that I like. Somehow when Dean gets mad it just seems petulant, but Clark's anger is entirely appropriate and he stays coherent.

my so-called analysis

While watching a few episodes of My So-Called Life over the weekend, a few things struck me.

So. Much. Flannel. Ah, the joys of early-mid '90s fashion. I remember getting my first flannel shirt and thinking it'd make me cool. God did middle school suck.

Some of the plotlines are surprisingly conventional. One example: parents go away for the weekend, the kids do something wrong that'll get them in big trouble and spend the whole weekend trying to cover their asses, yet only manage to solve the problem after the parents get home. Doesn't get much more Brady Bunch than that. Plenty of other episodes deal with more cutting-edge issues (school shootings, for example),

Discourse markers all over the place. Especially like. I became rather attuned to this sort of thing after working on MDE at the LDC over the summer. People say like and or something all the time. People on scripted TV generally don't. But the characters of My So-Called Life do. Something about the dialogue struck me as being off. What I'm not sure about is whether that oddness came from the novelty of TV characters talking like real people or the fact that the writers didn't quite capture the way people actually use discourse markers. They could have benefitted from some doing some MDE annotation...

two tales from one party

Swarthmore's fall formal was last night. I enjoy dressing up on special occasions, especially when I get to wear my rather stylish black and white patent leather shoes that always garner positive comments. A fair number of students didn't dress up at all, but that's pretty much par for the course.

The group I went with only stayed for an hour and a half. The music just wasn't doing it for us... too much rhythm, not enough melody. The high points were definitely when a song came on that we all knew and could really get into. We were much more content coming back to the dorm and listening to the typical Swat mp3 playlist. All in all, an enjoyable, but ultimately disappointing evening.

Yet when I talked to another friend today, he raved about how great the music was. He stayed 'til the end of the party and wished it had gone on longer.

How to account for this discrepancy? Most of the music played was hip-hop; the group I was hanging out with was predominantly white. The aforementioned friend who had nothing but good things to say about the music is black.

Such a crudely racial analysis misses an even clearer point, however. It's not that my group last night doesn't like hip-hop. Swarthmore students are remarkably eclectic in their musical tastes (thank you Napster, Kazaa, et al.).

So what's the solution? Safe favorites (the classic Swarthmore example is Madonna's "Like a Prayer") are just that... safe and old. But restricting the music to a fairly small slice of contemporary hip-hop isn't the answer either. People just don't have as much fun dancing to music they don't know. As usual, I think the path to follow is that of moderation. Play some songs that'll get the majority of people excited... early Michael Jackson seems about right, then take risks after people have some energy going.

the righteous brothers no more

Bobby Hatfield, the tenor to Bill Medley's baritone in the Righteous Brothers, died at 63. They may not have had a lot of hits, but when you're hits are as good as "You've Lost that Loving Feeling" and "Unchained Melody," it really doesn't matter. It doesn't get much better than Hatfield's soaring falsetto after all that buildup.

talk on the phone, contribute linguistic data, earn some money

The Linguistic Data Consortium is initiating a study to collect conversational speech for analysis. For every six minute call you complete in the Mixer Project, you'll get six dollars. And if you complete twelve calls, you get a fifty dollar bonus. Pretty sweet, huh?

If you do end up registering, try to say amusing things during your conversation... it makes the annotation task a whole lot more enjoyable.