Chrononautic Log: religion

June 20, 2006

Nice, thoughtful, albeit long piece from John Gruber, on his Mac blog Daring Fireball, on how people make choices (specifically, in this case, computer choices) and on how those choices tend to attract essentially misguided criticism.

It’s often said that you shouldn’t compare apples and oranges — generally used figuratively, but even looking at it literally you can see that it’s not true. You need to compare apples and oranges when you’re deciding what to pack in your lunch. What you can’t do is compare apples and oranges and somehow conclusively prove that one is better than the other.

Or ask yourself this: what would you rather read: a well-plotted but poorly-written potboiler or a well-written novel with a rather nondescript story line? A quick look at the best-seller lists tells you how most people would answer. The point is that you don’t choose one novel over another because it is somehow universally “better”, but rather because it is somehow more appealing, better for you, as an individual, based on the innumerable inscrutable tastes and desires and opinions that make you the unique snowflake that you are.

The reason this Pilgrim situation is so hideously complex is that all modern operating systems are complex. It takes a lot of work and investigation and expertise just to understand and form opinions about one of them, on its own; comparing one against another can’t be done by reducing the comparison to some single metric because they’re different in so many different ways. It’s easy to choose between two things that differ from each other in just one way — and it’s easy to explain your decision. Not so when choosing between things that differ in hundreds or maybe even thousands of ways.

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January 12, 2006

. . . but this is going to give the anti-Catholic wingnuts a whole new box of ammunition.

Vatican moves to clear reviled disciple’s name

JUDAS ISCARIOT, the disciple who betrayed Jesus with a kiss, is to be given a makeover by Vatican scholars.

The proposed “rehabilitation” of the man who was paid 30 pieces of silver to identify Jesus to Roman soldiers in the Garden of Gethsemane, comes on the ground that he was not deliberately evil, but was just “fulfilling his part in God’s plan.”

Next up: Brutus and Cassius.

At every mouth he with his teeth was crunching
A sinner, in the manner of a brake,
So that he three of them tormented thus.
To him in front the biting was as naught
Unto the clawing, for sometimes the spine
Utterly stripped of all the skin remained.
“That soul up there which has the greatest pain,”
The Master said, “is Judas Iscariot;
With head inside, he plies his legs without.
Of the two others, who head downward are,
The one who hangs from the black jowl is Brutus;
See how he writhes himself, and speaks no word.
And the other, who so stalwart seems, is Cassius.
But night is reascending, and ’tis time
That we depart, for we have seen the whole.”

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December 20, 2005

The judge in the Dover, PA creationism “intelligent design” case has handed the creationists’ ass to them.

We have now found that both an objective student and an objective adult member of the Dover community would perceive Defendants’ conduct to be a strong endorsement of religion pursuant to the endorsement test. Having so concluded, we find it incumbent upon the Court to further address an additional issue raised by Plaintiffs, which is whether ID is science. To be sure, our answer to this question can likely be predicted based upon the foregoing analysis. While answering this question compels us to revisit evidence that is entirely complex, if not obtuse, after a six week trial that spanned twenty-one days and included countless hours of detailed expert witness presentations, the Court is confident that no other tribunal in the United States is in a better position than are we to traipse into this controversial area. Finally, we will offer our conclusion on whether ID is science not just because it is essential to our holding that an Establishment Clause violation has occurred in this case, but also in the hope that it may prevent the obvious waste of judicial and other resources which would be occasioned by a subsequent trial involving the precise question which is before us.

. . . Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court. Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy. The breathtaking inanity of the Board’s decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources.

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November 1, 2005

Will Shetterly, following in a long and distinguished tradition, has started a new project, the Full American Translation Bible. It’s a new translation based on the American Standard Version (a 1901 translation, descended from the King James, and respected for its relative literality), informed by Will’s quirky humanist sensibility and stripped of later accretions of Christian theology and ideology.

Every translation is made by people whose purposes affect their translation. The King James Version was commissioned by a king, so it translates basileia ouranos as “kingdom of heaven.” This translation is more likely to use a phrase like “dominion of God” or “universal rule.” The King James Version translates YHWH, the name of God, as “the LORD.” The difference between a name and a title is profound; this translation will use “Yahu.”

You can get a sense of the flavor from the very beginning: The first creation story: the gods make the earth:

¹In the beginning the gods made the sky and the earth. ²The earth was waste and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep, and the spirit of the gods moved on the face of the waters.

He’s only a couple of chapters in, but I’m looking forward to seeing the whole thing completed.

And then I’m looking forward to writing an epic ten-volume Unitarian Universalist apocalyptic epic based on the FAT’s theology. I’m think I’m going to call it No One Gets Left Behind.

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September 12, 2005

Many of you already know this — indeed undoubtedly knew about it well before I did. But the rest of you must be told.

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May 16, 2005

Seen on the web:

“It has been conjectured that further symmetry breaking will lead to a God in Six Persons, which have tentatively been named Bereshith, Tetragrammaton, Incarnatus, Agape, Pentecost, and Paracletus.”

(Comment by “Carlos,” attached to Cherubim and Seraphim, Falling Down Before Thee, John & Belle.)

I don’t know why this cracks me up, but it does.

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May 13, 2005

From John Scalzi, some real Jesus bumper stickers.

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Unrelated note: How come *.blogspot.com goes down so freakin’ often? Doesn’t Google own them now, frchrissake?

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April 19, 2005

How long did Ratzi have his Pope Name picked out? And how many of the other papabili are sulking under their zucchetti and thinking “But I wanted to be Sixtus VI!”

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April 11, 2005

I have taken my vows and from now on I will be addressed as Brother Gatling Gun of Seeing All Sides of The Question. Fear our calm, well-reasoned discussions of the issues! Prepare to shake hands with strangers! Glory to the Unitarian Jihad!

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Also, I will, without reservation, make one act of worship, gratis, to the first celestial being who can cure this absolute bastard of a head cold I picked up this weekend.

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April 5, 2005

On the Pope’s death and/or legacy: I have no position.

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Update: But I will say that papabile is a cool word.

Especially if you make it an English word and pronounce it pape-able. (Rhymes with capable.)

(As for the suggested English equivalent, pope-able: I wave my paw and say “Bah.”)

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January 13, 2005

If the right-to-lifers are right, Heaven is chiefly populated with the souls of embryos.

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October 28, 2004

Go Sox!

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Update: As usual, Giblets has the best explanation.

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Update: Again, go Sox!

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April 8, 2004

I’ve known people who see divine purpose and divine providence in the suffering of others. One of them said to a person I know (who had one of those truly hellish cigarette-burns-and-everything-else abusive childhoods) that she wondered what my friend had done in a previous lifetime that caused her to choose to have such parents in this one.

When we heard about that, another friend fantasized about being there, punching out the woman when she made that remark, and then saying “Gee, I wonder what you did in a past life that caused me to hit you?”

—— Teresa Nielsen Hayden

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March 26, 2004

The Catholic Church has condemned Santa Muerte services as devil worship, and law enforcement authorities have linked the cult to violence committed by drug traffickers and child prostitution rings. . . .

Still, the real power behind the cult comes from Mexico's impoverished and neglected masses. . . . Those who attended this month said they were devout Catholics, but they said they adored Santa Muerte because she was their creation and because she had been created in their image.

According to her followers, Santa Muerte is not above pleasures of the flesh, even though she has no flesh. She prefers feathered boas and sequined gowns to celestial blue robes illuminated by the sun. She likes chocolates and flaunts rows of rings on each finger. She chain-smokes, and drinks her whiskey straight. . . .

Hayde Solís Cárdenas, 65, offered typical testimony. She sells smuggled tennis shoes for a living. . . . She said the Virgin of Guadalupe, Mexico’s patron saint, would not sympathize with a life like hers, tending rather to well-off people with college degrees and nice clothes. Santa Muerte, she said, hears prayers from dark places.

“She was sent to rescue the lost, society’s rejects,” Ms. Solís said.

“She understands us, because she is a cabrona like us,” the street merchant added, using a Mexican expletive. “We are hard people and we live hard lives. But she accepts us all, when we do good and bad.”

—— Ginger Thompson, “On Mexico’s Mean Streets, Sinners Have a Saint,” NYT, 26 March 2004

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October 24, 2003

Saint Drausinus (Bishop of Soissons, d. c. 674) is, apparently, the patron saint of the invincible. What do they need the help of a patron saint for?

Figure 1. The municipal seal of Soissons, about 550 years newer than St. Drausinus, a picture of whom I was unable to find. But look, maybe one of those guys on the side is supposed to be Drausinus. You never know.

Apparently he’s also the patron saint of people merely thought to be invincible. They, on the other hand, undoubtedly need all the help they can get.

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August 5, 2003

In light of recent(ish) discussions on the subject of religion:

Religion is a set of beliefs and practices about things that do not map one-to-one to the real world.

——Lydia Nickerson in Electrolite’s comments section

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June 20, 2003

An unrelated but pertinent observation from Will Shetterly:

The older I get, the more I suspect that many devout people understand that they’re engaged in symbolic discourse. They just don’t have the terminology to express this in a way that says something is truer for being symbolic than it would be for being literal.

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June 19, 2003

9-year-old girl marries dog in India

[AP] — ...The girl, Karnamoni Handsa, had to be married quickly to break an evil spell, according to the beliefs of her Santhal tribe in the remote village of Khanyan, the Hindustan Times said. ... Other news media also reported on the ritual, which does not interfere with the girl’s life. She suffers no stigma and is free to marry later. She doesn’t even need to divorce the dog.

The lesson, of course, is not that them foreigners is weirdos, but that the English language is sorely lacking in words to describe a culture with a richer world of relationships and rituals than we in the west end of Eurasia are used to.

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June 10, 2003

From the Camels and Needles Department:

[Alabama] Governor Riley has stunned many of his conservative supporters, and enraged the state's powerful farm and timber lobbies, by pushing a tax reform plan through the Alabama Legislature that shifts a significant amount of the state's tax burden from the poor to wealthy individuals and corporations. And he has framed the issue in starkly moral terms, arguing that the current Alabama tax system violates biblical teachings because Christians are prohibited from oppressing the poor.

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The Christian Coalition of Alabama has not yet taken a position on the September vote, but it has been speaking out against the plan’s tax increases. In an interview yesterday, John Giles, the group’s president, had trouble pointing to a biblical passage that directly supported his opposition to new taxes, but he referred to Jesus’ statement about rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s. The key question, he argued, is, “How much is Caesar’s?”

As the Bush administration and the religious right fight to put theology more squarely into public policy discussions, they are going to have to be ready for arguments like the ones coming out of Alabama. Many theologians argue that it is far easier to find support in the Bible for policies that help the poor than for, say, a cut in the dividend tax.

—— Adam Cohen, “What Would Jesus Do? Sock It to Alabama’s Corporate Landowners”, New York Times

No kidding. It’s stories like this that make me think how nice it would be if America actually had ad-hoc coalitions instead of political parties, the way George Washington envisioned it.

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March 4, 2003

From Philippe de Croy, via Rob, with regard to the recent Ninth Circuit decision that (government-mandated) recitation of the McCarthy-era “under God” clause of the Pledge of Allegiance by teachers and students violates students’ freedom of religion, an irony:

if nobody cared about it, the Ninth Circuit’s decision would look worse, because that indifference would suggest that as a matter of public meaning the “under God” phrase is genuinely insignificant and doing no harm (or good). Conversely, though, the angrier that people get about the Ninth Circuit’s ruling, the better the ruling tends to look.

Me, I’m unhappy about pledging allegiance to the flag, period. I’d find it much easier to get behind something like the congressional oath of office:

I do solemly [swear or] affirm that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge

— okay, not “the duties of the office on which I am about to enter”; let’s say

my duties as a citizen of the United States.

(Optional: “So help me God.”)

Now, the oath I had to sign in college in order to work for the UC, to support and defend the Constitution of California — is there somewhere I can publicly repudiate that? ‘Cause nobody should have to defend something that badly written.

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Correction: When I originally posted this I was under the impression that the Newdow case involved whether students could be forced to recite the pledge; that has been considered unconstitutional since 1943 and W. Va. State Board of Education v. Barnette. The decision in Newdow holds, rather:

that (1) the 1954 Act [of Congress] adding the words “under God” to the Pledge and, (2) [the Elk Grove Unified School District]’s policy and practice of teacher-led recitation of the Pledge, with the added words included, violate the Establishment Clause [of the First Amendment].

Whether or not you recite it yourself.

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Rob also has a scary post about Kosovo.

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