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Who’s There?

cartop.jpgI’m curious about who reads here.

Outside the few regular commenters, mostly familiar to me, there seem to be a number of lurkers who read only, and the stats detail on my server identifies the places they’re from. Some of them seem distant and unexpected.

So: Who’s from Great Britain? Germany? Austria? France? Spain? Portugal? Belgium? Italy? Who’s here from the Emerald Isle? 

Hungary? The Netherlands? Poland?

Sweden? Norway? Denmark? Finland?

G’day mate, and who’s here from Australia? And who’s from New Zealand?

South Africa? Hong Kong? Japan? India? Israel?

Canada? Brazil? Mexico? Chile?

South Korea? Latvia? United Arab Emirates? China?

The Russian Federation? Romania? Slovenia??

Love to hear from you. Take a minute to say hello!

And those of you in the States, give me a shout and tell me what state you’re in.

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What do you have to be afraid of?

cop1.jpgEverything is deep. Everything.

The simplest thing you can imagine – a grain of sand, or the fact that you have five toes on each foot – is filled with unimaginable complexities.

Even something as simple as sunlight, taken for granted for thousands of years by humans, turned out, once someone invented the prism, to be a mix of colored light. Strange to think that when you look into a bright white light, you’re also looking into a bright blue light. And a bright red light. A bright yellow light, and so on. But you are.

Light is deep, and so is everything else.

Continue reading “What do you have to be afraid of?”

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Fired Up, Fired Out

Wheaton CollegeWheaton College, Wheaton, Ill., requires faculty and staff to sign a faith statement and adhere to standards of conduct in areas including marriage. This is, after all, the origin-place of evangelist Billy Graham and the home of the globally evangelistic Billy Graham Center. 

It’s also the place that made national headlines on Feb. 20, 2003, when it lifted its then 143 year-old ban on student dancing. (Whoa! Next thing you know, they’ll be apologizing to Galileo.)

It would be weird to work or go to school in such a place, don’t you think? And yet some choose it, you have to believe deliberately. It does have a pretty respectable academic history.

Here’s a young man (I guess; he kept his identity a secret) who became an atheist halfway through his college years at Wheaton (he just graduated in December), and chronicled the journey in a blog called “Leaving Eden.”

Nov. 29, 2007: “Now is the time when all of my final papers and projects are due, all of which must be from a Christian perspective. Before I started I thought, no big deal, I know what the Christian perspective is, and anyway it’ll be kind of fun using words that I haven’t used in a long time, like sanctification, eschatology, spiritual discipline– not to mention the whole language of Wheaton evangelicalism that I worked so hard to become fluent in. / But man, it sucks. It actually makes me feel a little bit ill to have to do this.”

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A Young Artist’s Heartbreak

[Afternote: I looked up the history of Crayola on Wikipedia, and I’ve misremembered some of this. The 96-box came along well after I was in first grade. It was the 64-box I recall. I’ll correct it in a day or so. Meanwhile, here’s the original piece.]

…

crayons.jpgYou ever have the experience of finding something in your head you didn’t know was there?

I just had one of those moments. I’m not totally surprised to find it there — it’s based on a memory, after all. But it’s a leftover from, oh, about the age of 5 or so, and at my current age of 55, it’s just curious to find it still in there somewhere.

It has to do with how I felt about Crayola crayons. And the memory bubbled up at this bit on the ColourLovers site: All 120 Crayon Names, Color Codes and Fun Facts.

You remember when you were a kid how much you loved your Crayolas? You could do anything with those great colors. I wasn’t much of an artist when it came to creating original works on blank coloring paper, but I was pretty good at picking realistic colors to fill in pictures in coloring books.

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An unfortunately long post about a small but annoying event

A few years back, I tried to winkle out what it really means to apologize, and I worked out that – to me, at least – an apology has at least four parts.

1) You admit you did something wrong.

2) You show that you understand what it was.

Which means, you explain to the person injured just how you think you injured them. Ideally, you attempt to understand and describe how THEY feel you injured them. Part of this demonstration of understanding is that you visibly attempt to match the scale of the original injury with the scale of the apology. In other words, you don’t just say “Hey, my bad,” after you run over somebody’s head with your car.

3) You promise to try very hard not to do it again, ever.

4) You make an effort to fix what you broke.

Continue reading “An unfortunately long post about a small but annoying event”

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Gosh darn it, Francis Collins

collins.jpgUgh. This article bubbled to the top pages of Digg today. I’d known about it before, but found it freshly disturbing upon reading it again. From the Times Online:

Francis Collins, the director of the US National Human Genome Research Institute, claims there is a rational basis for a creator and that scientific discoveries bring man “closer to God”.

His book, The Language of God, to be published in [July, 2006], will reopen the age-old debate about the relationship between science and faith. “One of the great tragedies of our time is this impression that has been created that science and religion have to be at war,” said Collins, 56.

“I don’t see that as necessary at all and I think it is deeply disappointing that the shrill voices that occupy the extremes of this spectrum have dominated the stage for the past 20 years.”

  Continue reading “Gosh darn it, Francis Collins”

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Atheists should grow some.

bull.jpgJonah Goldberg is the author of “Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning,” which I haven’t read, but which has one of those woo-woo doublespeak names – something on the order of “The Anti-White Genocidal History of the Murderous, Hateful American Indians, from the 1500s to the Present” – that doesn’t exactly inspire me to want to rush out and buy it.

I’m pretty sure I’ve also seen one or two atheist-bashing articles in the past by the guy. So when I saw this bit in the LA Times Opinion page online, I figured it wasn’t an April Fool’s Day joke, despite the April 1 date on it. (Evidently he liked the piece so much he repeated it in the National Review Online on April 2.)

Just FYI, it’s editors who typically choose the titles for articles, so I don’t blame Goldberg too much for the header, but the piece is called “Evolution of religious bigotry: The cowardice and intolerance of slapping a Darwin fish on your car bumper.”

Ahem. Yeah.

Continue reading “Atheists should grow some.”

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PZ Catches Some Flack

blood.jpgPZ Myers posted a link to a new video, in which a Dutch somebody or other takes a whack at Islam … by showing pictures of beheadings, bombings, etc. You’ve probably read about it by now. The film is called “Fitna,” and does present a pretty harsh picture of Islam.

A substantial number of the commenters interpreted the posting of the link as a racist attack on Muslims, and they jumped on Prof. Myers in the comments with claws out on all four feet.

Those poor, maligned Muslims, can’t catch a break because so many people are so racist, so hateful, and the Muslims are really just downtrodden lovers of peace, blah, blah, blah.

Basically, they misinterpreted what Myers did, and what he said, and overreacted.

Here’s my comment on the thing:

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A New Element Discovered!

newelement.jpgSomeone emailed this to me. I thought it was too cool not to pass on:

UC Berkeley has just announced the discovery of the heaviest element yet known to science. The new element has been named “Governmentium.”

Governmentium has one neutron, 12 assistant neutrons, 75 deputy neutrons, and 224 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 312.

These 312 particles are held together by forces called morons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles called peons.

When catalyzed with money, Governmentium becomes Administratium, an element which radiates just as much energy, since it has half as many peons, but twice as many morons.

Since Governmentium has no electrons, it is inert. It can be detected, however, as it impedes every reaction with which it comes into contact. A reaction that normally takes one minute or less will require a week or more if contaminated by trace quantities of Governmentium.

The half-life of Governmentium is 4 years. It does not, however, decay, but instead undergoes a reorganization in which a portion of the assistant neutrons and deputy neutrons exchange places.

In fact, Governmentium’s mass will actually increase over time, since each reorganization will cause more morons to become neutrons, forming isodopes.

The characteristic of moron-promotion leads some scientists to believe that Governmentium is formed whenever morons reach a certain quantity in concentration.

This hypothetical quantity is called the Critical Morass.

….

Doing a search on the web just now, this thing appears to be everywhere out there, in a variety of versions. Wikipedia attributes the original to an article by William DeBuvitz in the Jan. 1989 issue of The Physics Teacher. Kudos to Mr. DeBuvitz, and thanks for the laugh.

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Does Jesus Make You Happy?

unbeliever.jpg“People who believe in God are happier than agnostics or atheists, researchers claimed yesterday.”

So begins another of the half-dozen or so stories I’ve seen on the subject over the past couple of years. This particular study, titled, revealingly enough, “Deliver Us From Evil: Religion as Insurance,” was carried out with data from Britain and Europe by Prof. Andrew Clark of the Paris School of Economics, and Dr. Orsolya Lelkes of the European Centre for Social Welfare Policy and Research.

If you’re religious, or inclined to faith, the persistent stories sound very positive. By believing, even if none of the rest of your religion is true, apparently you’re bolstering the chances of a rise in the level of your own contentment.

If you’re an atheist, on the other hand, it seems like yet another smug, annoying advertisement by the godder lobby: “Ha-ha unbelievers! We’re happier than you are! See? Science proves it!” If we aren’t already innately less happy because of our lack of faith, we can thank our goddy brethren for MAKING us unhappy with their insistent carping on how bad and wrong we are compared to them, simply because we don’t have their religion resident in our heads.

But aside from all that, the research, presented at the Royal Economic Society’s annual conference in Coventry, England, has at least SOME science behind it. If the study was rigorously done, it provides a hypothesis worth considering by people on both sides of the god divide.

Continue reading “Does Jesus Make You Happy?”