Last post...Or is it?

...Yeah, it probably is. I seem to have run low on blogging enthusiasm. I've been back from vacation for three weeks and still haven't managed to post anything until now. I think it's a combination of a busy boy at home, working on writing multiple research papers, and just a feeling like we've run out of new and interesting things to discuss. There have been over 800 posts here since we started the blog back in March of 2008, and we've covered a lot of subjects related to Christianity, science, politics, ethics, and others. So I think this will be my last post. At least for a while, and probably for good.

I'll keep the blog up for posterity though. And in case anyone wants to go back and read some of the most meaningful posts about - my thoughts on evolution, reconciling science and religion, my faith journey, and our scare with Toby's surgery, those will still be there.

Finally, here is a link to some very interesting recent post from one of, if not my favorite blog - The Daily Dish on a recent discussion they had about faith (and lack thereof). It lasted for like a whole week with different readers sending in their thoughts and the writers at DD publishing them. They summarized the string of posts like this:

Andrew once discussed religion blogging on the Dish as the intellectual cousin of the 3 am college dormitory debate over God. These topics have been argued into the ground for hundreds of years. If you are well schooled in theology, nothing that has been said this week will strike you as particularly new or ingenious. But that ignores that most individuals haven't had the privilege or time to seriously study theology and that each generation needs to rehash these debates in order to come to personal understandings about belief. Theology is central to many individuals' identities in a way electrical engineering is not. I didn't expect this week's discussion to resolve the question of God, but I hope that it allowed readers from all sides of the debate see those they disagree with more clearly. The reader e-mails demonstrate belief and non-belief as it is lived, rather than studied. And, judging by the reader response, many people have been found the conversation helpful in some small way.

One of the writers, Robert Wright has written what seems to be a fascinating book, The Evolution of God, that I plan on listening to it on my iPod in the near future.

Well, that's all. Thanks for reading everyone.

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I got to see the GOES-O Launch

This was my view from Cocoa Beach:

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Vacation

Just wanted to let you know - I will be on vacation for the next 2+ weeks. Maybe a post here or there, but for the most part, I will not be blogging. If you're bored, there are some interesting stories in today's Science in the News newsletter from American Scienctist. One claims that orangutans are actually our closest evolutionary relative, not chimps and bonobos. Another discusses the puzzling question of life's origins and why it is not more common in the solar system. A third claims to explain how dinosaur hands evolved into bird wings.

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The Students

Imagine if this was happening here at Illinois. Unthinkable. Pray for the students of Iranian Universities.

119 members of Tehran University faculty have resigned en-masse as a protest to the attack on Tehran University dorms last night. Among them is Dr Jabbedar-Maralani, who is known as the father of Iranian electronic engineering. They have asked for the resignation of Farhad Rahbari the appointed president of Tehran University, for his incompetence in defending the University's dignity and student lives.

Dr. Jebhe Dar Maralani, the president of Tehran University’s College of Electronics resigned in protest to last night’s killing of five students.

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What would Jesus do in Iran?

I have been enthralled by the events in Iran. I was not old enough to remember world changing events like the fall of the Berlin Wall or Tienamin Square, but this seems to be on the verge of becoming that important. The video, photos, and tweets coming from the people there are so incredible. Take this one for example. It shows a protester coming to the aid of one of the riot police, who just moments before was probably beating other protesters with his baton. If ever there was an image that captures what I think one of Jesus's central message to the people of our world was, it is this. Love your enemies:



Pulitzer Prize material if you ask me.

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Twitter in Iran

According to many sources on the web, the results of the Iranian election held yesterday were fraudulent. Much like the leadership change American voters chose at the ballot box last fall, it seemed the people in Iran were eager to see their country take a less belligerent tone with the West and increase civil freedoms in their country. From what I can tell, the (non elected) authoritarian leaders of the country could not allow that. They hand picked the current president for the job and any dissenters should be silenced. So they changed the results of the election to show that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had won a lopsided 63% of the vote. The citizens of Iran are protesting what they feel is a corrupt and dishonest government trying to fix the election and squash the voice of the people. But they are having trouble organizing their protests because the government controls most means of communication and has shut them down. One means though is proving difficult to silence: twitter. Ahmadinejad's opponent Mousavi posted a tweet urging protest. From Andrew Sullivan:

As the regime shut down other forms of communication, Twitter survived. With some remarkable results. Those rooftop chants that were becoming deafening in Tehran? A few hours ago, this concept of resistance was spread by a twitter message. Here's the Twitter from a Moussavi supporter:

ALL internet & mobile networks are cut. We ask everyone in Tehran to go onto their rooftops and shout ALAHO AKBAR in protest #IranElection

That a new information technology could be improvised for this purpose so swiftly is a sign of the times. It reveals in Iran what the Obama campaign revealed in the United States. You cannot stop people any longer. You cannot control them any longer. They can bypass your established media; they can broadcast to one another; they can organize as never before.

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Toby's got some wheels!

He's been crawling for a few weeks now, but we just got a pocket video camera to replace the one we lost in Chicago. Look at him go!

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More from Robert Wright

Wright, author of The Evolution of God, has an article at Cato-Unbound about the ability (or inability) to empathize with people from a different religion. In other words to see their perspective on an issue. It's based on an excerpt from his book, which is quickly becoming one of my must-reads. The modern examples of this need for "moral imagination" as he calls it, are the Christian West and the Muslim Middle East. It's a good article. This is how he sets up the piece:

This excerpt is a chapter that comes near the end of the book, after I’ve made an argument that, at the risk of oversimplification, boils down to this: In general, when a religious groups sees its relations with another religious group as non-zero-sum, it is more likely to evince tolerance of that group’s religion. When the perception is instead of a zero-sum dynamic, tolerance is less likely to ensue. (For an essay-length version of the argument, see this article, based on the book, that I wrote for Time magazine.) The moral imagination, I contend, is involved in this adaptive process.

For most of the book I make this argument by reference to the past. I tell the story of the Abrahamic God as he passes through three thresholds: the emergence of monotheism in ancient Israel, the emergence of Christianity, and the emergence of Islam. I argue that, during all these phases, fluctuations between tolerant and belligerent scriptures—in both the Judeo-Christian Bible and in the Koran—largely reflect fluctuations between zero-sum and non-zero-sum situations (or, strictly speaking, between the perception of zero-sumness and the perception of non-zero-sumness).

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Who's responsible for the national deficit?

See for yourself:

The first category — the business cycle — accounts for 37 percent of the $2 trillion swing...

About 33 percent of the swing stems from new legislation signed by Mr. Bush. That legislation, like his tax cuts and the Medicare prescription drug benefit, not only continue to cost the government but have also increased interest payments on the national debt.

Mr. Obama’s main contribution to the deficit is his extension of several Bush policies, like the Iraq war and tax cuts for households making less than $250,000. Such policies...account for 20 percent of the swing.

About 7 percent comes from the stimulus bill that Mr. Obama signed in February. And only 3 percent comes from Mr. Obama’s agenda on health care, education, energy and other areas.

Until Republicans actually show that they are the party of fiscal conservativism and responsible economic policies, I won't be paying much attention to any criticism they throw at Obama's economic plans.

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It's really happening!

Zach Morris is in, too! It's like I'm ten years old all over again!

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Abortion, continued 2

I don't think this is a useful way of contributing to the discussion. I would not be attending this church in Kansas City:



This is what Gal 6:7 says - "Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows." Hmm, I don't remember Jesus saying that his executioners should be murdered.

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Saved by the Bell reunion!

Mr. Belding is in!

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Abortion, continued

Newsweek blog has a write up of Andrew's abortion posts. It's a good summary:

Take some time today to visit Andrew Sullivan's blog over at the Atlantic, where one of the most capital-F fascinating discussions in recent blog history (which is pretty much all of blog history) is taking place.

After the murder of Kansas physician George Tiller, Sullivan—the deeply Catholic, economically-conservative pundit—did a great job of covering the political and sociological implications of the crime. But he also started posting first-person accounts of late-term abortion experiences, including some women who chose not to terminate and some who were under Tiller's care.

Throughout it all, Sullivan has been as transparent and honest with his readers as they have been with him, and as the posts continue, one can watch his personal beliefs regarding abortion evolve right there on screen. On Monday night, he said, "I still cannot in good conscience support these [late-term] abortions." By Wednesday morning, he was admitting that:

I am beginning to believe that these abortions, given their excruciating moral and personal choices, may be the most defensible in context of all abortions. And yet they seem to be taking life in a more viscerally distressing way. I need time to think and rethink these things. I would not have without reading these extraordinary accounts.

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Did you know rats laugh?

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Science in the news #104

"So long, and thanks for all the fish"
- the dolphins, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

From The Independent:

In my parents' lifetime, we have killed 90 per cent of the world's fish. In my lifetime, we will finish off the rest – unless we change our ways, fast. We are on course to be the people who wiped fish from the earth.

With fish, the solution is even simpler and more straightforward than with the other ecological crises ensnaring us. The scientific experts say we need to follow two steps. First, expand the 0.6 per cent of the area of the world's oceans in which fishing is banned to 30 per cent. In these protected areas, fish can slowly recover. Second, in the remaining 70 per cent, impose strict quotas on fishermen and police it properly, as they do in Alaska, New Zealand and Iceland.

The cost of this programme? $14bn a year – precisely the sum we currently spend on subsidising fishermen. At no extra cost, we could turn them from the rapists of the oceans into their guardians.

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Abortion

With the recent shooting of the abortion doctor George Tiller, the debate has been back in the news. Andrew Sullivan has been posting many reader comments sent to him on the issue, from both sides. They have been very emotional and heart wrenching. I've already written some of my thoughts on the issue in previous posts, so I won't go into it again. But I do encourage you to read some of the comments at Sullivan's site. It's quite different hearing the personal story of the struggle some go through compared to the abstract "pro-life" vs "pro-choice" sides. From a comment:

The posts from real women who have had to ponder and in some cases have late-term abortions has really changed my thinking. It may be the early term abortions that are most morally problematic, not the late term ones that arise under the most excruciating of circumstances. My own feeling is that our moral duty is to agonize and struggle over the serious choices we make, not always to make the usually unknowable "right" choice. By this standard, the women you have posted have more than done their duty. I would not want to second guess them.

Thank you for posting these messages, and especially thanks to the people who wrote them and were willing to have them posted. Just as gays coming out and being known destigmatizes you and them, getting these abortion stories out takes away the cartoon quality of the whole abortion debate. There just is very little black and white in the world and loads of gray.

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Quote for the day

I thought this was funny, probably because it's true:

It is a real puzzle for the science of the mind why, when an unpleasant event befalls us - we slice our thumb along with the bagel, or knock a glass of beer into our lap - the topic of our conversation turns abruptly to sexuality, excretion, or religion.

-Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought

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Science in the news #103

"Super Recognizers"

This one caught my eye because I think I am pretty good at facial recognition. At least on TV or in the movies. Maybe I'm a "semi super recognizer". I can almost always recognize actors from previous roles even if it's been many years since I saw the film or show they were in. Case in point - Tori Scott, Saved by the Bell.

From the San Francisco Chronicle:

In a study published in April, Harvard scientists coined the term "super-recognizers" to describe people like Jarett who have an uncanny ability to recognize and remember faces. The brain's ability to identify faces varies from person to person: while a small minority are unable to recognize others at all, the "super-recognizers" have an extraordinary talent for recollection, occupying the extreme end of the face-recognition spectrum, said Richard Russell, a postdoctoral researcher in psychology at Harvard University and lead author of the paper, published in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review.

Facial recognition is both extremely complex and vitally essential, said Marlene Behrmann, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Behrmann has found that in prosopagnosics, structural fibers connecting the subregions of the brain involved in facial recognition are compromised.

"These regions are optimized for something that is really important and that, evolutionarily, is perhaps the most important thing we do," she said. "You've go to know friend from foe really quickly. It's crucial."

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Oprah in Newsweek

This is an excellent article on Oprah. I can't figure out why she is so popular and influential. Her show is all mostly a bunch of hooey.

Her viewers follow her guidance because they like and admire her, sure. But also because they believe that Oprah, with her billions and her Rolodex of experts, doesn't have to settle for second best. If she says something is good, it must be.

This is where things get tricky. Because the truth is, some of what Oprah promotes isn't good, and a lot of the advice her guests dispense on the show is just bad. The Suzanne Somers episode wasn't an oddball occurrence. This kind of thing happens again and again on Oprah. Some of the many experts who cross her stage offer interesting and useful information (props to you, Dr. Oz). Others gush nonsense. Oprah, who holds up her guests as prophets, can't seem to tell the difference. She has the power to summon the most learned authorities on any subject; who would refuse her? Instead, all too often Oprah winds up putting herself and her trusting audience in the hands of celebrity authors and pop-science artists pitching wonder cures and miracle treatments that are questionable or flat-out wrong, and sometimes dangerous.

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"Finding Jesus at a Buddhist Retreat"

Andrew Sullivan and Bob Wright, author of The Evolution of God, discuss what religion should be and when it is at its best:

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