Circular Logic

Thank God

Thank you Judge Jones:

"...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 [Intelligent Design], 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."

While I'm sure this is hardly the end of the matter, it is nevertheless tremendously satisfying to those of us interested in moving society forward rather than backward toward the Middle Ages or beyond.

The whole brouhaha makes me wonder if we're doomed to eternally watch this kind of back-and-forth between religion and science. Similar attitudes can be heard even as far back as the reign of the Roman Emperor Julian over 1600 years ago:

"It is, I think, expedient to set forth to all mankind the reasons by which I was convinced that the fabrication of the Galilaeans is a fiction of men composed by wickedness. Though it has in it nothing divine, by making full use of that part of the soul which loves fable and is childish and foolish, it has induced men to believe that the monstrous tale is truth."

Well, we all love fable and monsters, so perhaps the best advice comes from Buffy the Vampire Slayer:

"If the apocalypse comes, beep me."

Beasts of Burden

Noah would be proud.

The Tulsa, Oklahoma Zoo has decided to embrace creationism. An upcoming exhibit aims to further blur the line between faith and science, following on the heels of our modern day Monkey Trial in Kansas. I wonder if people will visit the exhibit two-by-two?

Perhaps there are lingering bad feelings about being devoured by lions in the Coliseum, but I would have hoped that the right wing would leave the poor animals alone. On the other hand, I notice that Christianity doesn't hold a monopoly in exploiting animals for didactic benefit. There are apparently Zoo Torah Tours as well.

Zoos are a strange mix of the innocent and the controversial. It is hard to think of a zoo and not think of children smiling, holding their parents' hands while they look at the animals. On the other hand, the moral and ethical aspects of a zoo are disturbing to anyone with any degree of empathy in their heart.  Why, exactly, are we imprisoning these poor creatures? For our entertainment?

No, of course not. We're trapping or forcibly breeding the animals, transporting them around the world, and putting them on display...for science. For protection. For their own good. For religious instruction.

If you dig into the history of zoos you inevitably come upon some terribly tragic story that shakes your faith in humankind -- regardless of your religion.

In Afghanistan, the ultra religious Taliban regime's ghastly mistreatment of the animals in the Kabul Zoo (stoning and tormenting them) was second only to their ghastly treatment of their countrymen. Fortunately, it appears that conditions are improving.

And don't forget about infamous Colombian drug dealer Pablo Escobar's private zoo. When he was killed by police in 1993, the animals were apparently left to fend for themselves for a while. Eventually, many were relocated, but the hippos eluded capture to roam wild among the ruins of Escobar's decaying estate.

Here in San Francisco -- a city named after the patron saint who preached to the animals -- Karen and I live just down the street from the city's zoo. It is quite the tourist attraction, but even in this famously liberal city the zoo finds itself in political hot water from time to time. A fury of accusations and activist rhetoric followed the death of two elephants last year, causing zoo officials to close the elephant exhibit and retire the last remaining elephant to a nearby sanctuary.

The banishment of elephants from the zoo is undoubtedly a positive development for the poor beasts. And unlike Tulsa, we don't need to turn it into a political or religious statement.

Or do we?

Ahead of the Curve?

I was pleasantly surprised by the subject of a recent New York Times editorial (registration required). "It would be unfortunate if censorship by science museums helped drive them away from topics that might offend religious fundamentalists," quoth the Times. A milder version of a point I made in a previous post, and a nice illustration of the title of this blog.

Concave and Convex

I usually forget the difference between concave and convex. I'll bet most people do. Mirrors are often held up to describe the difference (one focuses, one diffuses), but if you want a mathematical definition, go here. I prefer metaphors.

• Radio telescopes are concave, capturing and concentrating signals from distant stars.
• Umbrellas are concave (at least to those holding them), keeping the rain out.
• And of course, caves are...well, concave as well (but let's not get into that other troubling duo, stalagtites and stalagmites).

The world of the concave encloses, focuses and concentrates. Lasers rely on concave mirrors to focus the intensity of light. Football players, when gathered in a huddle, look inward in order to see each other and focus their concentration. A mother's open arms are always concave.

By contrast, the world of the convex is the other side of the looking glass. Convex is the evil twin of concave, scattering rather than concentrating, rejecting rather than welcoming, blunting a blow or leading a charge. A few convex forms include:

• The back of a Galopagos Tortoise
• The rounded tip of a bullet
• The outer dome of a cathedral

Concave and convex forms abound in nature. They are a curious mix of offense and defense, at once the the protective sides of some enclosed space as well as the bulging offensive line of battle. Hard to tell the difference at times.

I'm thinking about this after reading a recent New York Times story about certain objections to a recent slate of Imax theater films.

People who follow trends at commercial and institutional Imax theaters say that in recent years, religious controversy has adversely affected the distribution of a number of films, including "Cosmic Voyage," which depicts the universe in dimensions running from the scale of subatomic particles to clusters of galaxies; "Galápagos," about the islands where Darwin theorized about evolution; and "Volcanoes of the Deep Sea," an underwater epic about the bizarre creatures that flourish in the hot, sulfurous emanations from vents in the ocean floor.

Imax theaters are concave. The whole experience of watching an Imax movie takes place in a protective, cave-like environment. It is like a darkened, sheltering space where images of the world flash by on an enormous curved wall.

Elsewhere in the article an Imax theater director talks about the trouble with Darwin's tortoises:

"We have definitely a lot more creation public than evolution public," said Lisa Buzzelli, who directs the Charleston Imax Theater in South Carolina, a commercial theater next to the Charleston Aquarium.

The argument makes business sense. Anything offensive in any way limits the number of paying customers. So, for better or worse, stick with what the majority wants to see. The problem is that we are having this debate in a hall of mirrors, where science, faith, entertainment, and ignorance are getting mixed together.

This has happened before, right around the time that Galileo came to understand the significance of concave and convex lenses. Using both, he was able to construct one of the world's first telescopes and begin observing the universe around him in new and better ways. Unfortunately, using science to better understand the world was not acceptable to the creationists of the time. In the end, he was forced under threat of torture to recant many of his discoveries and theories.

Whether something is a theory or a fact or a blasphemy depends on your point of view. Same with a concave or a convex form. You might even say that they are the same thing, because your perspective on each changes if you shift your stance.

Maybe that's why it is so hard to remember which is which.

A Question of Focus - Lasers, Grilled Cheese, and Martin Luther King

The Nobel Prize-winning co-inventor of the laser won the Templeton Prize honoring "progress toward research or discoveries about spiritual realities." The first award went to Mother Theresa in 1973.

“Many people don’t realize that science basically involves assumptions and faith. But nothing is absolutely proved. Wonderful things in both science and religion come from our efforts based on observations, thoughtful assumptions, faith and logic.”

This from prize winner Charles Townes who, according to the Associated Press, got flak from MIT years ago for religious comments in an alumni magazine.

I read this news the same day I heard an interview with Alan Jones, dean of San Francisco's Grace Cathedral and author of Reimagining Christianity: Reconnect Your Spirit without Disconnecting Your Mind. I must say it is nice to be reminded about the diversity of thought and perspective among people of faith. With gun-barrel dogma coming out of the White House on a daily basis, and with hypocrisy running rampant in so many so called defenders of our moral society (DeLay, Keyes, Bennett, etc.), it was nice to hear a thread of human sanity and genuine intellect enter the fray.

It still remains to be seen whether appreciation of the Madonna and Child as art and as a statement of compassion can hold out against grilled cheese sandwiches and literalist bigots. With apologies to Martin Luther King, just keep your eyes on the prize.

Cogito Ergo...?

Is education a religion? I'm thinking about this because I saw a piece in the New York Times today about religious blogs, and because of the ongoing Supreme Court arguments about the Ten Commandments. According to the Times piece:

No one knows precisely how many blogs there are, but a recent study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that roughly eight million American adults have created them. Lee Rainie, director of the project, estimates that 10 percent to 20 percent of those are related to religion.

Eight million? That's a lot of people. And about a million of them are doing blogs related to religion. I guess that makes sense given the tenor of the times, but it still seems like a lot.

Like religion, people see education as something intrinsically worth pursuing that yields rewards down the line. There is "good" education and "bad" education, and there are institutions to promulgate and manage the faithful.

On other levels, too, education and religion seem to go hand in hand. According to the Private School Universe Survey, conservative Christian schools in the U.S. have seen an increase of 46 percent in enrollment since 1989. Those additional students -- 245,000 of them -- accounted for 75 percent of the total rise in private school enrollment during the past decade. This is a voting block that the Republicans were shrewd enough to appreciate.

Where did this link between religion and education start? Common wisdom has it that the Catholic Church preserved learning when illiteracy and ignorance were widespread during the the Middle Ages in Western Europe. This is a bit ironic when you consider that the Church has cautionary tales about learning baked into its core doctrines. Think about Adam and Eve, and the consequences of opening one's taste buds to knowledge -- banishment from the garden. Think about the Tower of Babel, and the consequences of reaching too high -- death, destruction, and subtitles.  More specifically, think about the apostle Paul's anti-intellectual epistles to the Corinthians: God wants you to be ignorant!

Anti-intellectualism continues even to this day in fringe areas of various faiths. Closer to the mainstream you see it in the area of Evolution, with organziations such as the Creation Science Association for Mid-America chipping away at rational thought:

CSA is a non-denominational, independent, non-profit, educational and research corporation whose members are concerned about the widespread false teaching called "evolution". The widespread acceptance of this false notion of origins has resulted in physical harm to millions in this century alone, in lawlessness in our society, in the deprivation of a proper relationship with their Creator for countless people.

Gotta love the graphic.

Now, I should state for the record that I think people have the right to believe whatever they want as long as it doesn't harm others. I'm a bit wary about the Creationists, however, because I sense an underlying violence in their message. This tends to lead to bad things for everyone.

There were similar rumblings back in the late Roman Empire as attitudes were shifting about the pesky Greek schools of philosophy and their academy in Athens -- perhaps the original blue city-state? It eventually got to the point where the Christian emperor Justinian (483-563) closed down the last schools of Greek philosophy, essentially plunging Europe into the dark ages. According to Gibbon:

The Gothic arms were less fatal to the schools of Athens than the establishment of a new religion, whose ministers superseded the exercise of reason, resolved every question by an article of faith, and condemned the infidel or sceptic to eternal flames.

Harsh words, but hard to argue with nearly 1,000 years of brutality and ignorance. The Irish may have saved civilization (although I prefer to credit guys like Dante and the Medicis), but think of where we'd be if civilization didn't need saving in the first place.

A million people blogging about religion. Let's hope with all that education we've learned something from the past. The Irish might not be able to save us again.

Revangelist History

Interesting piece in today's New York Times by David Kirpatrick about David Barton, vice chairman of the Texas Republican Party and part of a movement trying "to call attention to the open Christianity of America's great leaders and founding documents." According to the article:

The goal is to reverse what many evangelical Christians claim is a secularist revision of history, to defend displays of religion in public life and to make room for God in public school classrooms.

Perhaps this is really another example of overcrowding in our Nation's classrooms. I mean, wouldn't you think that God -- all powerful, in the most powerful nation on earth, and among the most powerful political party of our time -- could make room for him/herself without needing help from David Barton and his legions?

Keep reading the piece and it starts to get creepy...

Their campaign and the liberal resistance have turned even the slightest clues about the souls of the Republic's great leaders - that Washington left church before communion and almost never referred to Jesus, that the famously skeptical Jefferson attended Sunday services in the House of Representatives, or that Lincoln never joined a church at all - into hotly contested turf in the battle over the place of religion in public life.

I always find it troubling that the adherents of the most dominant faith of our time in our culture have such collective chips on their shoulders. I suppose it demonstrates that the past is never really past, and long ago battles over faith and morality are never far from the surface. We're still fighting the battle over faith that ripped apart the Roman Empire.

This has been a recurring thought ever since I tackled an abridged version of Edward Gibbon's "Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire." Highly recommended, by the way. In particular, I was struck by the raging cultural wars during the brief reign of Julian (361-363 AD) -- later branded as Julian the Apostate. Julian was the nephew of the famous Emperor Constantine -- not to be confused with the Keanu Reeves character of the same name in the upcoming movie -- who moved the seat of the Roman Empire to Constantinople and established Christianity as the official religion. Julian was raised Christian but later rejected the faith and returned to the traditional Pagan belief system of the time.

When Julian becomes emperor, he takes a path that resonates with 18th Century Enlightenment idealism. In Gibbon's words:

Julian surprised the world by an edict, which was not unworthy of a statesman, or a philosopher. He extended to all the inhabitants of the Roman world the benefits of a free and equal toleration; and the only hardship which he inflicted on the Christians, was to deprive them of the power of tormenting their fellow-subjects, whom they stigmatized with the odious titles of idolaters and heretics.

Of course it all went to Hell later, but when I read pieces like Kirkpatrick's article I wonder what kind of path we are on with regard to faith and government. Is it possible that there will one day be a Jewish or perhaps even an Islamic President of the United States? Don't forget that in time Constantinople was overrun by the Turks and became the heart of a large and powerful Islamic empire.

If the conservative Christians do manage to get God into public school classrooms, I wonder if they'll be reading Gibbon.