Last week, I read two essays. One was by a columnist in a trendy urban magazine, writing against teaching Intelligent Design as science in public schools. One was by a conservative academic, writing against the demand that public speech and conduct should be sensitive or “politically correct”.
Category: The Enchanted Ones
God Jokes
Comedian Emo Phillips, writing in the Guardian Online, takes credit here for a joke voted the funniest religious joke of all time at the Ship of Fools. There are several other religious jokes in the story. Under modern British law, and under the law in many European countries, I suppose Phillips is on shaky ground telling religious jokes – if someone’s feelings get hurt, he might be charged with a hate crime.
A less risible approach to religious tolerance in an essay by Stuart Jeffries on religious tolerance, also from the Guardian Online, here. This essay takes a point made by Jurgen Habermas at a public lecture last year. The point is founded in his theories of civil society and the Public Sphere. AL Daily had a link to an article on Habemas in The Chronicle of Higher Education – but it has expired and now all you get is a stub article and an invitation to subscribe.
A different approach to tolerance again – Christian (American fundamentalist style) tolerance for secular culture in colleges and Universities – an essay called Faith Camp in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Read it now – I think this is a temporary link.
Hmmm
A recent story from the Times of London, on line, about a social study in the Journal of Religion and Society attempting to correlate religious practice with other social events. The Journal looks like a serious journal. The article in question, Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies by Gregory Paul, is on line in full here. Also of possible interest, Christian Theology in the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter.
Scientific Pharisees
There is a feature article on Richard Dawkins in the September 2005 issue of Discover magazine, by Stephen S. Hall, Darwin’s Rottweiler. It isn’t in the archives yet – only the first few paragraphs are on line. Hall credits the title of his article to Alister McGrath, in his book Dawkins’ God: Genes, Memes, and the Meaning of Life. It plays on the nickname for Thomas Henry Huxley – Darwin’s bulldog. It also plays on one of the nicknames – God’s Rottweiler – given to Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) by the media for his ferocious defences of Catholic orthodoxy during his tenure as prefect of the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. It implies that Dawkins is dogmatic and intolerant. Hall presents an overview of Dawkins’ work, with some attention to his limitations as a communicator. He is a good writer, and presents science to the general public in clear, accessible and poetic language. He is a well-recognized celebrity intellectual. Hall reports on Dawkins’ appearance in a panel discussion on the usual issue – how scientific views of evolution and religiously based views of a divinely created world should be presented in public schools. He reports on Dawkins’ turning on people who agree with him that Creation science and Intelligent design are phony, because they say they have religious beliefs and can reconcile scientific theories with their own religious belief. He seems to alienate them, and parts of a a friendly audience. Dawkins seems to have earned the Rottweiler nickname honestly. In spite of his charm, intelligence, and verbal skills, his social and political judgment seems to be impaired. This has allowed religious writers like McGrath to marginalize him as a fanatic, and to discredit his arguments.
Ruse on Evolution
In May, the Boston Globe (online) published an interview of zoologist, philosopher of science and popular writer Michael Ruse discussing his new book The Evolution-Creation Struggle. More recently, the American Scientist Online published another interview. The book expands on the arguments made in an article Is Evolution a Secular Religion, published in Science Magazine in March 2003.
I noticed a preliminary review of Ruse’s book and commented on it in an entry called Atheists, Darwinists.
Van Gogh Murder News
An update on the stories mentioned in my entry on Pluralism, Dutch Style.
The Dutch Courts have convicted the murderer of Theo Van Gogh. The BBC reported that Mohammed Bouyeri, who has joint Dutch-Moroccan nationality, was convicted of murder. Another BBC report on the public reactions to the case in Holland mentioned that he is going to be charged with terrorist conspiracy offences.
There are difficult aspects to this story. Bouyeri was a disaffected immigrant youth, apparently involved with drug use and street crime. He found new values in fundamentalist Islam, which made helped him live within a strict moral code, connected him to his cultural roots, and gave him a supportive community. It also indoctrinated him in an ideology of moral and cultural superiority and empowered him to become a terrorist and a murderer.
Foucault’s Spirituality
Neat. The English online version of a Turkish paper has a interview with James W. Bernauer, the American author of several books on the French philosopher Michel Foucault, tied in to the publication of a Turkish translation of one of his books. Bernauer teaches at Boston College and many of his books and papers identify him as James w. Bernauer S.J. which indicates that he is a member of the Jesuits, and therefore a Catholic scholar.
Bernauer says that Foucault’s later writings looked at philosophy as a method of care for the self and spirituality as a method of resisting the ideology of power imposed over individuals by society.
Philosophy or Religion
My review of Edward Craig’s Philosophy, A Very Short Introduction summarized his loose description of philosophy, which talked about understanding mystery. At the risk of embellishing his carefully elliptical description of the venture, he was talking about the great mystery of self-aware minds, awake in ape-like bodies, living among similiar beings with similiar physical and mental needs and powers, living in societies speaking the same languages, living in finite space and time, living within the safety and danger of the natural world, living subject to the actions of other people, and living with the ability to do things that affect other people and the course of events. How do such beings understand themselves and make decisions about what to do?
The word mystery suggests a religious project, but philosophy is aimed at understanding mystery without trusting the stories of priests,prophets and gurus who claim to have had the mystery revealed to them or to have mastered a tradition based on revelation allegedly subjectively experienced by some individual person or persons in history. Religion rests on trusting stories of revelation and miracles presented by other human beings.
Voluntary Simplicity
Voluntary Simplicity, has been around for 25 years, the first edition having been published in 1981. The author, Duane Elgin, describes himself as a former senior social scientist connected with an institution in California, and his biography mentions a business degree and an MA in economic history. He seems to presently support himself as a writer and motivational speaker. There is a political or moral dimension to his work, but his metier is self-improvement and spirituality. For a sample of his recent writing, there is an article at a site called Soulful Living.
I read a copy of the 1993 edition of Voluntary Simplicity which incorporates the findings of his simplicity survey, and has an Introduction by Ram Dass, the former Richard Alpert.
Retail Wages
Here’s an article in Christianity Today on living wages and Wal-Mart called “Deliver us from Wal-Mart“. This article takes a liberal Christian look at a social and ethical issue.