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I thought they were in favour of mixing religion in government.

13 July 2007 / / 1 Comment

Today in the Senate.

WASHINGTON: Christian activists briefly disrupted a Hindu invocation in the US Senate on Thursday, marring a historic first for the chamber and showing that fundamentalism is present and shouting in the US too.

Invited by the Senate to offer Hindu prayers in place of the usual Christian invocation, Rajan Zed, a Hindu priest from Reno, Nevada, had just stepped up to the podium for the landmark occasion when three protesters, said to belong to the Christian Right anti-abortion group Operation Save America, interrupted by loudly asking for God’s forgiveness for allowing the ”false prayer” of a Hindu in the Senate chamber.

“Lord Jesus, forgive us father for allowing a prayer of the wicked, which is an abomination in your sight,” the first protester shouted. “This is an abomination. We shall have no other gods before you.”

Democratic Senator Bob Casey, who was serving as the presiding officer for the morning, immediately asked the sergeant-at-arms to restore order. But they continued to protest as they were headed out the door by the marshals, shouting, “No Lord but Jesus Christ!” and “There’s only one true God!”

This is what they say about school prayer. Oh, it doesn’t have to be explicitly Christian. But would they be happy with a Wiccan prayer? A prayer to Allah? A Hindu prayer? Evidently not; America’s a Christian nation.

The organisation Operation Save America later issued a press release confirming that Ante Pavkovic, Kathy Pavkovic, and Kristen Sugar were all arrested in the chambers of the United States Senate “as that chamber was violated by a false Hindu god.”

“The Senate was opened with a Hindu prayer placing the false god of Hinduism on a level playing field with the One True God, Jesus Christ,” the statement said, adding, “This would never have been allowed by our Founding Fathers.”

Well, at least one. Thomas Jefferson was the author of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom.

It was adopted in 1779 with the valuable assistance of james Madison but not until a proposed amendment attempting to insert the words “Jesus Christ . . . the holy author of our religion” was rejected. In his autobiography, Jefferson notes the defeat of this proposed amendment “by a great majority, is proof that they meant to comprehend within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mohammedan, the Hindu and the Infidel of every denomination.“

Let’s all remember that pandering to these people just feeds their hunger for domination. They won’t be happy until other views are eliminated but their own. It’s never Jesusy enough for them. Abomination, indeed.

I could never be president of the USA.

5 July 2007 / / 1 Comment

Atheists don’t get elected to public office in America (very often). And so we see all the major players paying lip service to Gawd, or a higher power, or ‘spirituality’ or some other such claptrap.

But if I’m annoyed by political goddiness, colour me supremely irked by this:

Sen. Barack Obama drew his heartiest welcome of a two-day swing through Iowa in the state’s capital of inner peace.

To the frustration of the cameramen in the Fairfield town square, Obama delivered his remarks facing east, with the setting sun behind him blotting out their shots.

But here, there’s a power even higher than the television networks: Obama had positioned himself in alignment with the rotation of the earth, in accordance with the teachings of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, whose followers moved en masse to this small Iowa city more than 30 years ago.

You need votes, and you’ve got to pander to respect people’s beliefs. That’s the part I’d be rotten at. I’d probably tell them that the Maharishi was a fraud, that spirituality is just made up, and then I’d challenge them to show me some yogic flying. In short, I’d get nowhere at all with the nutball New Agers.

Obama needs to pander to faith, I suppose, but does he have to wallow in it? Surely part of the job of President must be calling out bullshit of one type or another, and Obama looks incapable of it.

And how does the Democratic Party hold together when it contains the secular Left and the New Age spiritual left at the same time?

Bush and Dems, through the floor

22 June 2007 / / Comments Off on Bush and Dems, through the floor

Bush at 26% approval. He has now broken through the Crazification Barrier and polled lower than the number of absolutely crazy people that will always be present in any population.

Now here’s the question: if you or I or anyone else were to start acting like Bush, siding with Bush, agreeing with Bush on the vital issues of the day, what would happen to their popularity? Would it go up, do you think? Or would it plummet?

Well, Congress has given in to Bush on lots of issues lately, including war funding for Iraq and abstinence-only sex education (to name two off the top of my head). Let’s see what happens.

The percentage of Americans with a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in Congress is at 14%, the lowest in Gallup’s history of this measure — and the lowest of any of the 16 institutions tested in this year’s Confidence in Institutions survey. It is also one of the lowest confidence ratings for any institution tested over the last three decades.

I know America’s a nation of Congress-haters, but this is something else. Americans sent Democrats to Congress to

a) be Democrats, and
b) counteract this insane president.

Instead, they’re refusing to stand up for Democratic values, and fulfilling every stereotype about ‘finger-in-the-wind’ wimpy politicians. It is intensely frustrating, even from where I’m sitting. And the polls are showing this frustration.

In one of his special comments, Keith Olbermann said

Our politics… is now about the answer to one briefly-worded question.
Mr. Bush has failed.
Mr. Warner has failed.
Mr. Reid has failed.
So.
Who among us will stop this war—this War of Lies?
To he or she, fall the figurative keys to the nation.
To all the others—presidents and majority leaders and candidates and rank-and-file Congressmen and Senators of either party—there is only blame… for this shameful, and bi-partisan, betrayal.

He was right.

Now what would it take to make it even lower and send Bush’s popularity to, say, four? Surprisingly, the answer is not ‘for Bush to screw up even more’. As if that were possible. No, for year after year we watched Monkey-Boy’s hijinks while his popularity remained improbably high.

But Bush’s popularity among the faithful was never about Bush himself, or his actions. It was more how they ‘felt’ about Bush the Symbol. As long as he remained the rallying point, as long as he represented their feelings of self-worth, as long as they invested themselves in him and his ideology, those numbers were always going to stay high. And since an authoritarian cult of personality abhors a vacuum, stay high the numbers would until a new Saviour could appear — a Republican the public could like. Yeah. Good luck. Who would that be? Cheney? Giuliani? Ha.

But just as soon as someone comes along in which the faithful can invest their sense of self, the Bush cult will utterly collapse, and we’ll see approval ratings in the low teens. The groundwork is already being laid; you’ll be hearing the ‘Bush is not a True Scotsman’ from now until November 2008. Well done, keyboard konservatives. Keep it up. He will come.

Sesame Street clips

16 June 2007 / / 4 Comments

I’ve just gotten 200 exams from some very smart students, so I’ll be marking them for the next few days.

But while I’m busy, why not regress to childhood?

At least, my childhood. I’m two years older than Sesame Street, so all the really early Sesame Street clips are burned onto my memory. I remember Mr Hooper. I remember the first Gordon, and I can remember when Luis had a crazy Latino friend named Rafael. I even remember when The Count had mind control powers. And who’s this Elmo I keep hearing about?

Even though those episodes are gone, here they all are on YouTube. Do you love living now, or what? All the things we thought were lost and gone are at our fingertips.

I’ve spent a few minutes getting misty over these clips. Here are my favourites:

Rolling Ball 1 2 3

For some reason, this clip is a kind of scene in my mind that I’ve had ever since I was little. I love it. But why does the ball get ground to powder? It’s the hero of the story. Is it the evanescence of mortality?

Would You Like to Buy an O?

Man, is that guy shady. I’m afraid if he offered me letters, I wouldn’t be able to resist.

Capital I

This one’s kind of CSNY. If your life’s work were this simple, would that be good or bad?

X

This one actually freaked me out as a kid. What the hell is that thing with spikes? Childhood can be a very frightening time. I still love the tune though. It’s so wistful.

National Association of W Lovers

A great song, despite the present-day Bush connotations. What’s better; the rocking podium, or the way Bert throws back his head before starting in? It’s nice that Ernie shows up to the meetings to support his buddy.

Church activity and evolution

13 June 2007 / / 1 Comment

Let’s dip our canteens in the stream of public opinion.

The majority of Republicans in the United States do not believe the theory of evolution is true and do not believe that humans evolved over millions of years from less advanced forms of life.

And the more often you go to church, the less likely you are to understand facts.

The data from several recent Gallup studies suggest that Americans’ religious behavior is highly correlated with beliefs about evolution. Those who attend church frequently are much less likely to believe in evolution than are those who seldom or never attend.

You see what’s happening here: evolution is being used as an indicator for other kinds of scientific understanding. Good choice, too. It’s as well-supported a theory as we get, so if someone refuses to accept it, it probably means they lack understanding on other scientific topics, as well as skill at knowing how to tell if an idea is good or not.

These results follow some patterns that I think are pretty consistent in religions I know of. As a Mormon, I happily believed unsupported or even counterfactual ideas, as long as I liked them or already believed them. I was sometimes encouraged to superficially examine the basis for my faith, but only if I eventually arrived at the conclusion that the Church was true. And I was given terrible mechanisms for evaluating ideas; basically, if I felt ‘good about it’, it was true. I was also surrounded by parents, friends, and authority figures who constantly worked to build my (and their) faith in false beliefs. And so the religion forms a bubble that keeps you ‘feeling good’ about your beliefs by constantly reaffirming them. It’s very difficult for facts to penetrate the bubble.

Religions are support groups for reality deniers. And so, it seems, are political parties.

World Environment Day

5 June 2007 / / 5 Comments

In honor of World Environment Day, I’d like to invite you to tell a global warming denier to get nicked. I did recently, and it was a good experience.

This time it was the LaRouche folks, back on campus after a long hiatus. The newspaper handout said “Global Warming is a Fraud!”

Now it’s one thing to see all sides of an issue and take a critical stance on the issues of the day. It’s quite another to create doubt where none exists, which is after all the business of global warming deniers, intelligent design creationists, flat earthers, and (dare I say) holocaust deniers, all of whom refuse to accept consensus when the evidence is in.

And yes, global weather is a really complex thing. The problem with these guys is that they’re not good at complex. Have a look at the nuance these guys are capable of:

Not that I disagree with Dick Cheney as Child of Satan, but if I ever hand out something like this on street corners, please restrain me. Thank goodness for LaRouche’s tireless efforts to, er, bring Cheney down.

So when offered the newspaper, I genially invited the gentleman to shove it up his ass. His friend muttered “idiot” after me. It was the most productive conversation I’ve ever had with global warming deniers. Took less time, and had the same outcome.

Faure Requiem

3 June 2007 / / 1 Comment

Last Sunday’s performance of the Fauré Requiem was glorious. I felt emotionally wrung-out afterward. I’d always been partial to the Duruflé Requiem for listenability — I always found the Fauré a bit flat and featureless. But whenever I perform a piece, I always magically like it more. (Do people ever really enjoy a piece of music without performing it?) So now I see the Fauré differently. I think Fauré was trying to do more with less: a limited orchestra (with only one violin), a stripped-down text, and only two soloists. It’s not a difficult sing. But such emotion he gets out of the simple tunes.

While singing the Requiem, I had the same feeling I got doing Carmina Burana: the feeling of mortality. One theme for Carmina is the Wheel of Fortune (and it even appears on the cover of the sheet music). Sometimes you’re up and sometimes you’re down. But during the performance of the famous ‘O Fortuna’, I imagined the image of the Wheel as a torture rack. An infant is born, pitched helplessly into a world of noise and pain and fear and glorious sensation. You can’t stop it. You’re carried along, and sometimes riding the Wheel is horrifying and confusing, and being alive always leads to death.

That feeling came to me during the Fauré ‘Agnus Dei’. It’s about two minutes in. The choir sings ‘lux aeterna’ in fervent and melancholy descending chords. Now we’re at the end of our ride on the Wheel, and the music mirrors our descent to bed and to the grave. To extinguishment. It’s fearful and helpless. The organ and orchestra convey the plangent, almost overbearing sensation of standing at the end of life. Who will save us?

But Fauré ends with the ‘In Paradisum’, with its sumptuous vision of the rest and peace of an afterlife. There’s one part that I always listen for — it’s where the men join the sopranos on the word ‘Jerusalem’. Simple chords, but so lovely. There I was, between two first tenors, and me a second, and the sound was just right. It became difficult to sing because I was getting verklempt.

So — a good show. I’m glad I sing. It keeps me in touch with my life and my humanity.

Fallacy of the Day

31 May 2007 / / 7 Comments

The Fallacy of the Day comes from Sam Brownback. You may remember him — in a recent debate, he was one of three Republicans who didn’t ‘believe in evolution’. This means he’s too stupid to run for president of the USA, and America being what it is, that’s exactly what he wants to do.

Now he’s written this piece: What I Think About Evolution.

Just a note here: It matters not a jot what Mr Brownback or I or anyone else ‘thinks’ or ‘believes’ about evolution. Evolution is happening all the same, though we may need to update the theory from time to time as evidence warrants. Actually, I don’t believe in evolution either; I accept it as a more or less correct theory. But let’s put semantics and pedantics aside.

Here’s the heart of his argument:

The question of evolution goes to the heart of this issue. If belief in evolution means simply assenting to microevolution, small changes over time within a species, I am happy to say, as I have in the past, that I believe it to be true. If, on the other hand, it means assenting to an exclusively materialistic, deterministic vision of the world that holds no place for a guiding intelligence, then I reject it.
…
The most passionate advocates of evolutionary theory offer a vision of man as a kind of historical accident. That being the case, many believers — myself included — reject arguments for evolution that dismiss the possibility of divine causality.

The fallacy committed here is that of wishful thinking. Mr Brownback doesn’t like the idea that humans might have arisen through random, unguided chance, so he’s agin’ it.

Let’s inform the scientists. Everyone: the Republican from Kansas doesn’t like it. It must not be true.

Why are we good?

29 May 2007 / / 3 Comments

Some evidence that morality comes, not from religious training, but from our evolutionary wiring:

The results were showing that when the volunteers placed the interests of others before their own, the generosity activated a primitive part of the brain that usually lights up in response to food or sex. Altruism, the experiment suggested, was not a superior moral faculty that suppresses basic selfish urges but rather was basic to the brain, hard-wired and pleasurable.
…
Joshua D. Greene, a Harvard neuroscientist and philosopher, said multiple experiments suggest that morality arises from basic brain activities. Morality, he said, is not a brain function elevated above our baser impulses. Greene said it is not “handed down” by philosophers and clergy, but “handed up,” an outgrowth of the brain’s basic propensities.

It shouldn’t be surprising to find an evolutionary basis for altruism; critters that can work together will naturally have some advantage over those that have to plug along by themselves.

I’ve blogged before about the connection between mirror neurons, language, and morality, but it seems that this evolutionary wiring must go back farther than that.

No one can say whether giraffes and lions experience moral qualms in the same way people do because no one has been inside a giraffe’s head, but it is known that animals can sacrifice their own interests: One experiment found that if each time a rat is given food, its neighbor receives an electric shock, the first rat will eventually forgo eating.

A good article, but why did they have to include this?

Their 2006 finding that unselfishness can feel good lends scientific support to the admonitions of spiritual leaders such as Saint Francis of Assisi, who said, “For it is in giving that we receive.” But it is also a dramatic example of the way neuroscience has begun to elbow its way into discussions about morality and has opened up a new window on what it means to be good.

Assisi, schmassisi. I can hear the blather already: ‘Science is only now just beginning to recognise what spiritual leaders have been teaching for centuries.’ When in fact the discovery is one more sign of religion’s irrelevance.

Interesting facts about the Friday Random Five

25 May 2007 / / 7 Comments

This week’s FR5 presents songs and trivia, all from my own encyclopedic memory.

But first, let’s just gaze for a moment at the cover of the new Björk album, Volta.

Well, that’s a relief. For a little while there, I thought it was going to be something weird.

I’m gearing up for a performance of Fauré’s Requiem I’m doing on Sunday, so I’m not listening to any popular music this week. Well, maybe Cibo Matto. And the following Random Five.

I’d Like to Walk Around in Your Mind by Lush
Album: Topolino

  • This is a sweet little guitar song that conceals a bitter little core, which means that it’s a perfect Lush song.
  • The song is credited to ‘unknown’, but it would appear to have been an early Vashti Bunyan song.
  • She describes how she’d like to get inside the head of someone who hasn’t been particularly kind to her. Most unsettling lyric: But most of all I’d like you to be unaware / And then just wander away, dragging palm leaves behind me, so you don’t even know that I’ve been there.

12 Hours by The Whitlams
Album: Little Cloud

  • This album was produced by J. Walker of Machine Translations, and as a result, the album is about nine times more interesting than a typical Whitlams album.
  • It’s a spare piano song about post-seduction regret.
  • The Whitlams were named after an Australian Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam. He was famously dismissed by the Governor General, which is sort of like being fired by the Queen. Since then, Prime Ministers have selected GG’s for their timidity.
  • Best lyric: ‘Some may drown their sorrows; mine, they like to swim.’ Too bad it’s a U2 lyric.

Get Off the Stage by Morrissey
Album: Piccadilly Palare (Single)

  • This song was written and played on by Andy Rourke, Morrissey’s former Smiths bandmate.
  • This song is a relentless self-parody. He taunts himself as an aging pop star and mocks his misguided trousers, his… mascara? Fender guitar?
  • Silly me. It’s a dig at Mick Jagger.

Special by Garbage
Album: Version 2.0

  • Three of the members of Garbage are producers, including Butch Vig of Nirvana fame.
  • Garbage is the worst name for a band. You have to be a really good band to have a name like Garbage.
  • They got that name because one of their friends heard an early demo, and said, “This shit sounds like garbage!”
  • This song appeared in a hallway shot in an episode of Dawson’s Creek. Remember Dawson’s Creek?
  • The theme of the song is a fairly involved three-part harmony. Fortunately, they drop the instrumentation around it for a while so it can be heard properly.

Lithium (live) by Nirvana
Album: Nirvana Live Vol. 1

  • This is a really crappy bootleg.
  • The songs appear on the disc as one long track. I had to cut the songs into tracks myself. How crap is that?
  • Pretty crap.
  • I remember that the video for this song had the Nirvana guys apearing in Beatle outfits, interspersed with them in dresses. There were two endings, one for each outfit. MTV tended to play the non-dress-ending one more.
  • I never got to see Nirvana live. The SLC show in 1994 sold out too quickly.
  • That sucks.

And the increasingly likely Bonus Sixth:
Video Killed the Radio Star by Buggles
Album: The Age of Plastic

  • The Buggles featured brilliant Art of Noise producer Trevor Horn.
  • This song was the very first song ever played on MTV.
  • The Presidents of the USA covered it once.
  • I still think it’s a good song.
  • Trevor Horn compiled the soundtrack to the movie Coyote Ugly. He used music from the early nineties, which made me think that his musical knowledge stopped there.
  • But then he did produce The Life Pursuit by Belle and Sebastian, which means he’s still relevant, and we owe him something after all.
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