AzN is the new black

So this was pretty predictable:

"I understand what happened recently at Virginia Tech," said the teen's father, Albert Lee, referring to last week's massacre of 32 students by gunman Seung-Hui Cho. "I understand the situation."

But he added: "I don't see how somebody can get charged by writing in their homework. The teacher asked them to express themselves, and he followed instructions."

Allen Lee, an 18-year-old straight-A student at Cary-Grove High School, was arrested Tuesday near his home and charged with disorderly conduct for an essay police described as violently disturbing but not directed toward any specific person or location.

So, it seems clear that Lee was pretty dumb to have written this so soon after Virginia Tech, but, even so:

Unless somebody is holding back some important fact, this young man is getting a raw deal. He doesn't belong in the criminal justice system. And the main reason he was treated this way is that people are on edge because another young Asian-American student killed 32 people two weeks earlier in Virginia.

(I sure am glad my high school days are far behind me. If being a socially inept Asian student inclined towards dark and disturbing imagery had been the profile of a rampage-killer-in-the-making back then, I'd have been screwed. Actually, now that I think about it, I still fit that profile. Ooh, look out!)

I don' blame his teacher for alerting her supervisor at the school. I can see where she might have been worried.

By all means, pull him out of class the next day and try to figure out what's going on. Haul in his parents to find out what they know. Huddle with the rest of his teachers. Get him to a shrink for a psychiatric evaluation. Interview his friends, if it seems necessary.

Hell, call in the police if they honestly believe the young man poses some kind of a real danger and ask them to look into it.

But to have him arrested and criminally charged as the starting point of their response, based solely on what he wrote for a class assignment that instructed him not to censor himself, that's just outrageous.

Judging by the e-mails to the newspaper, I'd guess that at least half of you disagree with me. Lucky for me, you can't have me arrested.

Many of you are from the better safe than sorry school of thought.

Similarly, whenever I see a black man walking in my direction on the sidewalk, I always cross to the other side of the street. Better safe than sorry, I always say. (Crap, when I started writing this, I told myself I wouldn't turn it into some race thing. Oh, well.)

End of a scholarly era

Well, for Anglophone students of Kierkegaard, at least. Earlier today I was looking up pictures of Kierkegaard scholars Howard and Edna Hong in order to show Dawn how they aren't even a little Asian, and we ran across news of Edna Hong's fairly recent death.

The Hongs are best known for going approximately 30 years without sleep in order to produce probably the best available English translations of Kierkegaard's works, comprising just about every word he ever uttered. The results of their efforts currently make up a substantial and pleasantly coordinated section of my own little library.

Enough said

The Christian Century interviews Bill Moyers and asks:

Some people on the left think the Democratic Party needs to be more explicitly religious. What do you think about that counterstrategy?

If you have to talk about God to win elections, that doesn't speak well of God or elections. We are desperate today for cool thinking and clear analysis. What kind of country is it that wants its politicians to play tricks with faith?

(h/t JP)

"Finding Eternal Hope in Present Sorrow"

Are you bored of the garden variety empty platitudes and mindless punditry that quite naturally followed the Virginia Tech shootings? I have the cure for you: Doug's Blog: On the Horror at Virginia Tech. The writers at the Onion couldn't do a better job of coming up with a parody of a Christian Right analysis of the shooting spree.

The post starts out by addressing the "why" question. Now, talking about the "why" question doesn't make Doug's post stand out from the crowd (nor does his answer to the question), but I would like to say something about that general phenomenon. (Perhaps similar to this Slacktivist post.) When news-worthy tragedies like this happen, and people start talking about topics in the vicinity of the problem of evil, I get a little confused. Because I'm pretty sure that just about everyone knows that, say, the Holocaust happened. (I briefly considered picking a less trite example, but what the heck, let's not pussyfoot around.) And it seems to me that if you can believe in God despite the fact that the Holocaust happened, you ought to be able to believe in God in the face of any other tragedy or atrocity that current events can throw at you, without much breaking a spiritual sweat. (To be sure, if one had a special personal connection to one of the victims, I could see how that could create an especially deep emotional sting that could make an understandable difference here, but this is not the case in general.)

OK, so much for that.

What really makes Doug's post shine are such points as: Christians need to go out and convert people in this time of need:

We must be emboldened in our sense of urgency to communicate to others the only source of hope from death.

And we can probably lay some of the blame for the shootings on the secular humanist hegemony that permeates the American public sphere:

We have forsaken the law of God and have worshipped before false idols. We have sacrificed our children, not only spiritually and intellectually to the high priests of a new secular religion in our government schools...

And probably legalized abortion contributed to the shooting:

...but have quite literally sacrificed baby boys and girls to the gods of convenience in the abortuaries of America. One out of four Americans is not here because they were aborted by their mothers.

And let's not forget the theory of evolution:

Our children are being taught the Gospel of evolution and man. It is a religious faith that ultimately teaches that transcendent truth does not exist; life is meaningless, being the product of chance. Why are we surprised when the present generation acts upon the logical implications of this false gospel? If we do not see the connection between this false faith and the culture of death, we are blind bats, or willingly ignorant.

Plus this just goes to show how being armed all the time is a Christian duty:

A strong case can be made that in a violent society like our own, it is the duty of every Christian man to be armed such that he is ready, willing, and able to come to the immediate aid of his neighbor in the face of the ruthless behavior of lawless men.

And just to finish it off, an additional curiosity regarding how Doug makes that last point:

We have one of two futures — a police state full of regulation and controls, where only the state and criminals have access to guns, thus leaving most women and children defenseless to evildoers, or an informed, well-armed citizen population, which is, to my mind, the surest safeguard against lawless men.

What I find curious is that he picks out "women and children" in particular. Are unarmed men not, in general, defenseless when confronted by an armed "evildoer"? Plenty of dudes died at Virginia Tech. Testicles do not in fact provide any protection against bullets. Or maybe it's taken for granted that manly men only ever concern themselves with the protection of their offspring and womenfolk, never paying any regard to their own safety in the face of danger. I just dunno.

Now, is this the single stupidest thing to be written in response to the Virginia Tech shootings? I have enough faith in humanity to be confident that it's not. But it's still a remarkable piece of work.

(h/t Jesus Politics)

Confidential...

To whomever it was who arrived at this blog after googling for "Heidegger thanksgiving": if you should happen to search for that again, and run across this post, please leave a comment explaining what it was you were hoping to find. It is bugging the hell out of me.

Vonneguttered

RIP Kurt Vonnegut, humanist extraordinaire.

From A Man Without a Country (see here):

For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that's Moses, not Jesus. I haven't heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes be posted anywhere.

"Blessed are the merciful" in a courtroom? "Blessed are the peacemakers" in the Pentagon? Give me a break!

As a result of passages like this (from earlier works), I credit Vonnegut with getting me to start reading the Bible with a bit of charity. At the time, that meant seeing Jesus as a socialist, which I wouldn't see as a particularly good characterization nowadays, but a heathen's gotta start somewhere.

Here's hoping he didn't have too much trouble getting through that death thing, whatever it is.

Backblog

O! my poor neglected blog!

Lessee, what's been happening?

1. One of my sisters is going to college down in Daytona Beach. So, naturally, when Spring Break hit, she wanted to come up to visit me in frigid unbeachy Chicago. All things considered, I very much approved. (My teenaged sister? In Daytona Beach for Spring Break? Like hell.)

2. The new crop of prospective grad students came down for the annual "prospective week" to check us out. I hosted a guy from Finland who said he'd already decided to accept our offer of admission, barring anything short of a "catastrophe". I guess they knew what they were doing when they sent him to stay with me.

As per tradition, the week's festivities included a night of Live Band Karaoke. I horribly abused "Living on a Prayer" (accursed rock anthems!), but then redeemed myself by doing a decent rendition of "Hunger Strike" with a fellow rockstar (I was Vedder, he was Cornell, and we totally nailed the harmonies).

3. Dawn and I went thrift shopping uptown. Chicago has some awesome thrift stores. One of them was in the heart of the gay neighbourhood, which is cool, because gay guys are more likely to wear pants that fit me. (Chicago is, by some estimates, the fattest city in the country, and I have a skinny ass.) I found a pair of shiny black Armani pants in my size for $20. A good deal on Armani, I'd imagine, but that's about 4 times the price of any other pair of thrift store pants. Still, I was sorely tempted to buy them, and then go around saying "Who are you wearing? (etc.)"

4. My preliminary essay (mini-dissertation, due right after the next New Year) is going to be on Socratic irony. I've totally decided.

The wheel in the sky

I had a dream.

I had a dream that there was a spoked wheel spinning around in the sky. (Coincidentally, I've recently been reading Ezekiel.)

I don't know how many spokes the wheel had, but I'm pretty sure it ought to have had twelve.

Adjacent to the spinning wheel was a Bible. Upon picking out a Bible verse, the wheel would stop spinning, and a spoke on the lower-right side of the wheel would poke out through the wheel's rim, then turn until horizontal, and merge into the Bible verse. Then it would come back out, and take its original position in the wheel.

The wheel would then begin to spin again, until another Bible verse was chosen, and so on.

I'm pretty sure this was a vision that will someday lead me to develop some kick-ass scriptural hermeneutic. As in, if you got this hermeneutic, you would automatically get 10,000 bonus Experience Points in Christianity (and probably in Judaism, too, though I'm not so familiar with the level system in Judaism). I just need to figure out what the spokes represent, and why they have to be arranged in a wheel (for this was crucial) and why the wheel has to be spinning (for this was absolutely crucial).

Quantum Kierkegaard

Check out this exciting new book:

The first volume of The Lost Spiritual World explores the complete Gospel of Mark, using the renowned Scholars Version by academics from Harvard, Notre Dame, Vassar, and other major universities.

How respectable is that? The webpage even goes on to quote Kierkegaard.

Nearly two hundred years ago, the great theologian Soren Kierkegaard concluded that “Christianity is absurd.” But he was not mocking; he was despairing our inability to believe in a scientific age. [...] The Lost Spiritual World struggles within the tradition of Kierkegaard

But that's not all. Other selling points include:

The Lost Spiritual World is not shaped like a rectangle. In Greek, the word orthodox means “straight thinking.” But some fundamentalists have called me a "blasphemer" and a “heretic” because I don't "think straight" according to their orthodox doctrines. That's why I created the wavy shape. It immerses you into the quantum field, showing you how to explore the interconnection of seemingly opposite perspectives.

The Lost Spiritual World uses twelve metallic inks. Their vibrational frequencies have been around since the Big Bang, but we are just becoming aware of them. They literally connect you to the cosmic stardust from which you were born. They sparkle with the living presence of our real creation story, the real elements of God within us.

I have come to suspect that if you took a poll of people who say they do "work" on quantum physics, the scientists would be far outnumbered by people who think that quantum physics has something to do with Kierkegaard.

Academic update

This quarter has consisted of:

A logic course on the meta-theory of sentential and first-order logic. I've done more than enough logic before, but I think it would be a good career move to be able to teach logic in the future, so I wanted a refresher. Turns out a fair bit of the material is new to me - as far as I can remember, which isn't saying much, considering that I learned some of this stuff a decade ago (eep).

A course on medieval philosophy. I'm not going to do much with any of this, but I think it's worth having filed away in some compartment of my brain.

I'm also sitting in on a course on the New Testament in the Divinity school. It's interesting, sometimes-despite / sometimes-because it's not presupposing any sort of Christian perspective.

Plus some of us have been doing a reading group on the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, which is just marvy.

My coursework gets wrapped up next quarter. Looks like I'll be getting deep into Freud territory. I'm planning on taking a course titled "consciousness", which is really about the unconscious mind (it should be titled "the unconscious"). I've also just found out that another department is giving a course on "neuropsychoanalysis" which has me intrigued and somewhat excited. I plan on taking that, too, so I might end up getting to make use of some of my cognitive science background, which is a little unexpected.

I'll also have to start work on my "preliminary essay", which is like a mini-dissertation. First I'll have to find a topic. Then I'll have to write about it. Both are daunting tasks.

Things you can learn in college

The office of the President of the University set up a task force on sexual ethics, which has produced, among other things, a useful poster providing some "Educational Guidelines for SEXUAL CONSENT!"

Informative excerpts:

Some POOR Practices

VIOLENCE: The threat of or use of violence or force negates any previous consent or subsequent assumptions of consent.

COERCION: Like physical force, coercion and intimidation negate consent.

DRUGS & ALCOHOL: GIving someone drugs or alcohol with the intent to impair his or her judgment or make them unconscious violates the Illinois law.

HARASSMENT: By the very definition, when someone is sexually harassed, the behavior is unwelcome; therefore, any form of sexual harassment is non consensual. For instance, masturbating in front of someone without their agreement and/or touching and groping someone at a party is not considered consensual.

Well, I'm glad that got cleared up.

(At the risk of depriving some wayward college student of this wisdom, I decided to take the poster home to decorate my apartment.)

Windy winter wonderland

I just got back from a quick trip to the store. Or, it should have been a quick trip the store. It took a bit longer than normal, because I had to contend with the odd 3 foot snow drift, and 50 km/h wind gust.

Woo! Great fun. For me, I mean. For people who actually have things to do and places to go, it's a terrible inconvenience, but, me, I just got to bound around in the snow and get blown around a bit, and share a chuckle with a guy using a briefcase to plow his way to his door.

Whose God is it?

An untranscribed portion of the video for this ABC News story on the prejudice faced by Muslims in the American military begins:

It is a sign of their devotion when Muslims bow 5 times a day towards Mecca and pray to their God.

See anything weird? Let's try a little substitution:

...when Christians pray to their God.

...when Jews pray to their God.

It's quite unlikely that ABC news would ever air a statement like that. Because the God that Jews and Christians pray to is just: God. "God" here is a proper name, and identifies its referent quite nicely without anyone having to stick a possessive adjective in front of it. In fact, maybe I should remove that capitalization:

It is a sign of their devotion when Muslims bow 5 times a day towards Mecca and pray to their god.

Yep, that's starting to look icky.

So by identifying the object of Muslim prayer as "their god", the article (which is meant to address anti-Muslim prejudice) also perpetuates a kind of anti-Muslim prejudice, by suggesting that Muslims worship some freakish alien deity completely unrelated to the one that normal people worship.

This was probably unintentional. As Slacktivist has noted on occasion, journalists tend to be pretty much clueless when it comes to issues of religion. But there are people who really do think that Allah is something entirely distinct from God; some Christians even think that Allah is Satan or some such. Hearing this sort of thing on the news isn't helping matters.

Defending the faith, Maimonides style

I'm studying some medieval philosophy this quarter, and so far the star of the show is clearly Maimonides, a leading Jewish jurist and philosopher (and a member of a Jewish community which flourished under Arab, Islamic rule - something worth keeping in mind for those who think that religious differences (particularly those involving Muslims) are an irremediable threat to the public peace).

Maimonides' major philosophical work is The Guide of the Perplexed, which deals with, among other things, the problem of people who raise objections against scripture. At one point, he addresses a representative example (of someone who criticizes the story of Adam and Eve getting kicked out of the Garden). Never mind the substance of the objection and Maimonides' response - just feast on how he prefaces the response:

O you who engage in theoretical speculation using the first notions that may occur to you and come to your mind and who consider withal that you understand a book that is the guide of the first and the last men while glancing through it as you would glance through a historical work or a piece of poetry - when, in some of your hours of leisure, you leave off drinking and copulating: collect yourself and reflect, for things are not as you thought following the first notion that occurred to you, but rather as is made clear through reflection upon the following speech. (Guide, I, 2)

Sadly I was unable to "reflect upon the following speech", for I was laughing too hard at the time. (Maimonides presents this as something he actually said as part of a real conversation. If only we could go back in time and bring him into the present to have a chat with Richard Dawkins.)

And here is a diagnosis of why some people are limited in their abilities to understand religious matters:

There are, moreover, many people who have received from their first natural disposition a complexion of temperament with which perfection is in no way compatible. Such is the case of one whose heart is naturally exceedingly hot; for he cannot refrain from anger, even if he subject his soul to very stringent training. This is also the case of one whose testicles have a hot and humid temperament and are of a strong constitution and in whom the seminal vessels abundantly generate semen. (Guide, I, 34)

One of those is, in fact, a major difficulty I have faced throughout my own studies.

I am awesome!

You know the Bible 100%!

 

Wow! You are awesome! You are a true Biblical scholar, not just a hearer but a personal reader! The books, the characters, the events, the verses - you know it all! You are fantastic!

Ultimate Bible Quiz
Create MySpace Quizzes

Boo yah! Plus 15 God Points for me!

(Dawn points out there's a scriptural reference there: "But be doers of the word, and not hearers only" (James 1:22). Except "reader" has been substituted for "doer" - a questionable adaptation.)

(h/t Scott)

Edification but not maturation, up-building but not growing-up

A bunch of us are doing a reading group on Kierkegaard/Johannes Climacus' Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments. The other day, this passage came up:

A person in love, for instance, to whom his erotic love is his very inwardness, may well want to communicate himself, but not directly, just because the inwardness of erotic love is the main thing for him.

It was Dawn that brought it up, and read it out, and then all the guys started giggling.

Erotic love! Hee hee hee.

From a bit later on in the Postscript:

Here erotic love manifestly means existence or that by which life is in everything, the life that is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite. According to Plato, Poverty and Plenty begot Eros, whose nature is made up of both. But what is existence? It is that child who is begotten by the infinite and the finite, the eternal and the temporal, and is therefore contiually striving.

Striving... erotically!

Kierkegaard makes existence sexy. Oh. Yeah.

Faith is a rope, tied between man and God - a rope over an abyss

On occasion I've wondered about the connection between Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. The SEP informs:

Kierkegaard's social realism, his deep psychological and philosophical analyses of contemporary problems, and his concern to address "the present age" were taken up by fellow Scandinavians Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg. Ibsen and Strindberg, together with Friedrich Nietzsche, became central icons of the modernism movement in Berlin in the 1890s. The Danish literary critic Georg Brandes was instrumental in conjoining these intellectual figures: he had given the first university lectures on Kierkegaard and on Nietzsche; he had promoted Kierkegaard's work to Nietzsche and to Strindberg; and he had put Strindberg in correspondence with Nietzsche.

Which leads me to wonder whether this striking image (from Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra):

Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman --- a rope over an abyss.

...has anything to do with this one (from Kierkegaardian pseudonym Anti-Climacus' The Sickness Unto Death):

As a sinner man is separated from God by a yawning qualitative abyss.

That would be a disappointing adaptation. Compared to the original, Zarathustra's abyss is like a puddle in a gutter or a crack in the pavement. Silly Nietzsche.

The creation story of the Timaeus

In the Timaeus, Plato describes the fashioning of the universe (thought of as a living being) by the Creator:

...he made the world in the form of a globe, round as from a lathe, having its extremes in every direction equidistant from the centre, the most perfect and the most like itself of all figures; for he considered that the like is infinitely fairer than the unlike. This he finished off, making the surface smooth all around for many reasons; in the first place, because the living being had no need of eyes when there was nothing remaining outside him to be seen; nor of ears when there was nothing to be heard; and there was no surrounding atmosphere to be breathed; nor would there have been any use of organs by the help of which he might receive his food or get rid of what he had already digested, since there was nothing which went from him or came into him: for there was nothing beside him. Of design he was created thus, his own waste providing his own food, and all that he did or suffered taking place in and by himself. ...as he had no need to take anything or defend himself against any one, the Creator did not think it necessary to bestow upon him hands: nor had he any need of feet, nor of the whole apparatus of walking; but the movement suited to his spherical form was assigned to him, being of all the seven that which is most appropriate to mind and intelligence; and he was made to move in the same manner and on the same spot, within his own limits revolving in a circle. All the other six motions were taken away from him, and he was made not to partake of their deviations. And as this circular movement required no feet, the universe was created without legs and without feet.

So if you've ever wondered why the universe is perfectly spherical, or why it's lacking in eyes, ears, mouth, hands, and feet, there's your answer.

Islam and terrorism postscript

In response to my post on The "new atheism" and Islamic terrorists last week, Paul recently commented:

Damn, I wish I'd found this post earlier... now I'm relegated to making mostly unnoticed comments.

So they don't go unnoticed, here are those comments quoted in a new post:

Are there certain "Islamic" beliefs that enable suicide bombings? Short answer - yes. Most suicide bombers in the most recent campaigns (Iraq, Afghanistan, the Second Intifada, and Al Qaeda's jihad) really are motivated in crucial part by visions of a glorious afterlife. And the virgins thing, though almost certainly mistranslated, actually counts - the fools in the martyrdom videos are often damn near salivating over the prospect.

But it's ludicrous to say that this makes suicide bombing a uniquely Muslim phenomenon, or even a uniquely religious one. The now-marginal Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade subset of Fatah, for example, didn't claim explicit religious sanction for its bommbings like Hamas or Al Qaeda do. A far starker example would be the Tamil Tigers, who have never promised their human missiles a bountiful afterlife but have fielded (at last count) nearly 150 suicide bombers in Sri Lanka. For other examples, see the Japanese kamikaze pilots, the Jewish Zealots of the 1st century AD, or the Sikh bodyguards who assassinated Indira Gandhi. Or (shameless plug coming up) just peruse my M.A. thesis, when I get around to posting it on my blog.

That's not to say there aren't serious problems in Islam right now; there are. Chief among them is a disturbing legitimacy conferred, even by many 'moderate' Muslims, upon those who respond to perceived heresy with violence and collective punishment. But that's an argument for another day. In the meantime, speaking as a proud atheist, I've lost most of my once-substantial respect for Richard Dawkins, who now pursues his atheism with the characteristic snark and lack of intellectual rigour one typically expects from the most ardent religious fundamentalists.

One more thing: "'There are no atheists in foxholes' isn't an argument against atheism, it's an argument against foxholes." - James Morrow

I'm pretty much in agreement with all of that. Here are a couple of points in response, to make clear how very much I agree with all of that.

I hope the first paragraph there wasn't intended as a criticism, because I do of course recognize that a lot of Muslim terrorists think of their activities in terms of the concept of martyrdom (and also jihad). My point was that functional equivalents of those concepts aren't particularly difficult to come by. (I figure ideals of nationalism and generic heroism do just fine. The Tamil Tigers probably illustrate that.)

And as for other "serious problems in Islam", there are plenty of those: responses to heresy, responses to apostasy, the treatment of women, and so on. I take it there's a question here whether these are genuinely intrinsic to Islam, but I don't know enough about Islamic theology to comment on that. In any case, these problems (while far from trivial) are beside the point when it comes to the most hysterical fear-mongering about Islam (such as we find in Dawkins and Harris, and other bigots across the political and religious spectra), which declares that Islam could very well be responsible for the end of civilization, or whatever.

sigh

Bush's interview on 60 Minutes:

PELLEY: Do you think you owe the Iraqi people an apology for not doing a better job?

BUSH: That we didn't do a better job or they didn't do a better job?

OK, pause. He just willfully misheard that question. Apparently he actually thinks that there's a question whether the Iraqis should apologize to America for not doing a better job of... what? Not having their homes invaded and getting shot execution style in the street by armed militias? Not being kidnapped on the way to school? Not getting stopped at fake checkpoints, killed, and then dumped some place where their families never find them? Yeah, they really should stop having that happen to them. It's a big annoyance for Americans.

PELLEY: Well, that the United States did not do a better job in providing security after the invasion.

BUSH: Not at all. I am proud of the efforts we did. We liberated that country from a tyrant. I think the Iraqi people owe the American people a huge debt of gratitude, and I believe most Iraqis express that. I mean, the people understand that we've endured great sacrifice to help them. That's the problem here in America. They wonder whether or not there is a gratitude level that's significant enough in Iraq.

I... I... I don't think I know enough swear words to respond to that.