Music And Language Are Processed By The Same Brain Systems

I find this intriguing: that bran imaging research "...tells us that these two aspects of music, that is rules and memorized melodies, depend on two different brain systems – brain systems that also underlie rules and memorized information in language,”
Which would support the, to me, anecdotal evidence that prosody can be leveraged to teach some supposedly tone-deaf people to sing. I'm also intrigued by the partial explanation that this could give to the desire to use song in worship: it's actually a reflex of wanting to say things to God ... ? The instinct for sung worship is deeply rooted. Perhaps that's why it's not commanded in scripture: it is hardly necessary; if people worship they will sing.

Of course this also has intriguing correlations potentially for understanding the image of God. I have been thinking about 'homo loquens' in relation to the image of God, now I find I should factor in singing too.

As the researcher, Ullman, says. “The findings open up exciting new ways of thinking about and investigating the relationship between language and music, two fundamental human capacities.”
And another piece of research recently published tells us, "new research suggests, music training may have considerable benefits for engendering literacy skills."
Maybe we should be taking musical metaphors for relating to God and God relating to the world more seriously...
ScienceDaily: Music And Language Are Processed By The Same Brain Systems:

TRADE -film about people trafficking

I haven't spotted when this might be released in the UK, but it looks worth keeping an eye out for.
TRADE

USAmerican low carbon living

Encouraging news from USA, though less encouraging in the macro.
BBC NEWS | Video and Audio

Que Hora Es?

What would a sopopera look like on only three weeks' Spanish? Claro, hombre: asi.

YouTube - Que Hora Es? Part 2

Navel-gazing, omphalism and speech

Ever since I discovered it in a book called "Did Adam and Eve Have Navels?" I have thought that omphalism is a great illustration of special pleading. If you're unfamiliar with it, it's "a special brand of young earth creationism that is generally referred to as “Omphalism”. Omphalism comes from the Greek word for the umbilicus, omphalos. In brief, it explains the signs and appearance of a very advanced age of the universe by stating that God created it fully-formed to appear as if it were much older. This nice little dodge allows omphalists to explain that data from things like the geological record, paleontology and ancient fossils, radiocarbon dating, and measurements to distant stars are phenomena fashioned by God as if the universe were billions of years old. The earth, then, is 6,000 or so years old (some generous young-earth sorts will allow up to 10,000 years) but made fully-developed as if a long history were true."
I actually mentioned it previously on this blog in relation to its linguistic reflex in that the original couple seemed not to have to learn language to speak with God, and possibly each other.

mayfly � Blog Archive � Navel-gazing: Htt Doug at Metacatholic.

Anti Phishing Phil

It's a game, it's online and it educates you into avoiding phishing scams. It's clearly something to book mark and pass on to people who send you emails with worrying attitudes to things on the internet.
Phish

Therapeutic jurisprudence and atonement

At first this may seem a bit 'out there' but it makes a lot of sense. "'Law school teaches you about rules, arguments and logic -- but not the impact of the law on the emotional life or well-being of people,' says Wexler, a distinguished research professor in the James E. Rogers College of Law. 'That has been an underappreciated aspect of the law -- a dimension of the law that has been ignored.' But, through research, he found that 'you could look at the law as a dynamic social force with consequences and behavioral impacts.'" So far so good. And things have moved even further:
" 1. The theory began in mental health law, but has since moved into other areas, such as family practice and criminal law and, in fact, "across the legal spectrum," Wexler says.
2. In effect, therapeutic jurisprudence is now more interdisciplinary and presents the marriage between law and psychology as complementary, not "two disciplines in an adversarial posture." Also, other disciplines have become increasingly engaged, such as criminal justice, public health, social work and anthropology.
3. Therapeutic jurisprudence has moved from theory to practice, with much interest expressed by judges and lawyers.
4. The practice has taken off internationally in areas such as Australia, Canada, Israel and Pakistan.
5. Also, higher education institutions increasingly have begun offering courses on therapeutic jurisprudence, as well as legal clinics that offer training in the practice."
There's theology in there somewhere too: it resonates with some of the jurisprudential practices that seem to be in Levitical law and with the theme of relationality. But more interestingly in moving to a picture of law where relationship and human well-being are more to the fore, it undercuts the plausibility of some more formally forensic approaches to atonement, I suspect.

ScienceDaily: Legal Proceedings Can Be Therapeutic, Study Finds:

Manage Your Bookmarks

I use two different PC's regularly and also occasionally borrow one and also use internet cafe machines from time to time. So having a way to access my bookmarks wherever is really handy. I recommend this one and I concur with the review here. "Foxmarks is a Firefox plug-in that synchronizes bookmarks between as many PC's as you like. Transfer time for them is unnoticeable and it just works the way it's supposed to. You can also log into their site from any browser and see your bookmarks."
Manage Your Bookmarks / Wired How To's:

Moral panic over tech and sociability

It really is starting to seem to me that all that handwringing about how social software is causing a breakdown in society is actually a moral panic. The following quote shows why there is a lot of nonsense being written and said about it:
"It might look like I'm ignoring a passing acquaintance in order to 'use my phone.' But actually I'm checking in with a new mom who is running home, baby and business on her own while her partner's job has him commuting to Canada temporarily. "
We need to remember the McLuhan doctrine that technology extends existing human capabilities. This means that it may distort some existing cultural thingies, but it will open up others. It will redistribute the balance of goods and ills but rarely, if ever, will it be entirely one or the other.
Rude People, Not Tech, Cause Bad Manners:

The sounds of silence

Here's a helpful brief introduction to the Quakers by British songsmith and performer, Tom Robinson ("2,4,6,8 Motorway" and "Sing if you're Glad to be Gay") who has in recent years been attending a meeting house. I really liked this description of the experience of keeping silence in company.

For me the focused, expectant silence of the meeting was like nothing I'd ever experienced. Birdsong or traffic noises would mingle with the occasional cough, or creak of a seat, within the room. And after perhaps 10 minutes there would be a sense of the silence deepening - like a coastal shelf falling away beneath our feet. A profound, inner stillness would descend as fidgeting diminished and superficial sounds receded into the background.

For non-Brit readers, the title of the article Silent witnesses is an allusion to the title of a forensic crime series.

Celibacy: new cool

Fascinating article about the new celibacy, written by an interested party who happens to be Muslim. The interesting thing is the reasons for the celibacy and the mould-breaking lifestyles and beliefs of some of the women who form part of the Prim and Proper Pussy Club (The PPPC).

Their celibacy is as much a rebellion as promiscuity. And while other belief groups base their virtues on some kind of pre-ordained set of rules, The PPPC doesn't comply with any but its own. In many ways these women are living a life I would love, but, although I was invited, I chose not to join them. I don't think I'm quite cut out for all the drugs and alcohol: I'm trying to bring about a general moral change in myself, not just my sex life. I would love to see other groups like this start up, though - ones that make their own rules, provide a support network, and don't force us celibate folk to compromise our cool.

'Celibacy can be rebellious'
Filed in:

Podcast on The Spiritual Brain

Denyse O'Leary in a Canadian radio interview about the difficulties of materialistic monism. There is some good stuff here in terms of her being quite good at saying important things simply. May help you decide whether you want the book. I reiterate that this is an important apologetics issue and I predict will become increasingly a topic of debate between theists and others.
Click here to get your own player.


Intelligent Design The Future

Don't tase me, bro

For a change, it's the British press that seems to have missed a big controversy, to which the title phrase makes reference. "the Monday arrest and tasering of Andrew Meyer, a University of Florida student. Meyer barged in line to harangue Massachusetts senator John Kerry during a campus talk that day. The student refused to pipe down after being asked to by the forum's organizers, and after he carried on pressing Kerry for answers, police hauled him off. They forced him to the ground, and tasered him."
And that's the shocking (pun not intended, but kept) thing: that the guy is not formally arrested, read his rights and when subdued, apparently, has a taser applied to his chest. He may have been behaving in a less than dignified manner, but given that people have been known to die from tasers, he shouldn't have been handled like this. Scary.

Of course, on a less 'political' note, the birth of new verb should be noted. Normally a verb created from a noun simply keeps form and changes function: so we would expect "Don't taser me ...", so to have a verb 'retrofitted' from a noun on the basis, presumably, of its '-er' ending is noteworthy.

I think that 'taser' was based on 'laser', which itself in an acronym. But maybe some reader can supply further info on that.
Threat Level - Wired Blogs:

Now this really is random nonsense -but fun

Boohbah Zone

Religions will be heard when they stop fighting for power

It's a very powerful soundbite, is that. Puts me in mind of the idea I heard once that religions ought to compete to see who could produce the most holy, merciful and beneficent followers. Of course the problem then gets down to whose definitions prevail. I liked the Williams soundbite for what it suggests positively. But the problem comes when you start to flesh it out. He went on to say:

They cannot be committed to violent struggle to prevail at all costs, because that would suggest a lack of faith in the God who has called them. They cannot be committed to a policy of coercion and oppression, because that would again seek to put the power of the human believer or the religious institution in the sovereign place that only God’s reality can occupy.

Having just been reading Kenneth Cragg's Muhammed and the Christian, I am very aware of how Christian this is and how different it looks from at least some, if not most, Muslim perspectives. The intriguing thing is, though, that it does make an appeal to a real Islamic sensibility about the sovereignty of God and God being 'greater' and avoiding shirk. It's as if Rowan has put a wedge into a small crack between standard Muslim views about the use of state violence/coercion and the radical exalting of God that, frankly, is the most powerful emotional attraction of Islam for me. Intriguing. I'd love to see Muslims sign up to it.
Church Times - ‘Religions will be heard when they stop fighting for power’:

The Future of Atheism

I haven't thought about this much as I write, but I'm wondering whether this is a kind of mirror image of Anselm's ontological argument... "experiment: if the evolutionary account of religious belief that many atheists are now promoting is correct, then atheists don't have much of a future. Their own arguments, plus some elementary demographic data, show that their position cannot become dominant. The only real chance that atheism has to flourish is if it's wrong."
Rumors of Glory: The Future of Magazine:

Gloves of God vs. Punch of Proof

Hmmm. What does a poll like this one really indicate? "Francis Collins, former head of the Human Genome Project (and onetime atheist), rejects the notion that science is sufficient to disprove the existence of God. Biologist Richard Dawkins, aka Darwin's Rottweiler, insists that anyone who believes in an omnipotent creator is suffering a 'delusion.' Can the gloves of God defeat the punch of proof? "
The readership will determine the result. I would guess that the people who read Wired are more likely to have a certain opinion already on the issue. So all this is doing is registering the relative plausibility of the statements to a largely atheist/agnostic constituency. Interesting, though, to look at the figures for each statement.
Wired Geekipedia: Faith Smackdown - Gloves of God vs. Punch of Proof:

Musical Listening Test

Help research into human ability in hearing music. This study is being conducted by my former university at Newcastle and involves "listening to pairs of tunes and deciding whether they are the same or different. Once you have completed both tests you will receive your scores. "
While I got a high score, it wasn't perfect. There are some sequences which are harder to differentiate or 'similate' than others. I'm certainly interested to know the results. There seemed to me to be something about rhythm, something about tone, something about order and something about complexity involved. Short term memory for these things is part of it but memory is based on perception ...
Delosis - Musical Listening Test:

A visual history of art

This may delight you -or possibly infuriate. It's a romp through various mainly 20th century painters using a morphing animation. It's an interesting way to see pictures; click on the title of this post.
DNAStream - Mutant Television

Muslims who convert risk being killed

At one level, the heading tells us nothing new; it is a sad fact in many parts of the world. What is new is the scenario where an estimated 3,000 in Britain could be at risk. Now, stated baldly, like that, it seems to be scaremongering. And yet, perhaps Michael Nazir-Ali (whose name tells you something of the personal stake he has in this matter) has recently spoken of his concerns, and note that there is a real transferable precedent: "The bishop warns that Muslims who switch faiths in Britain could be killed if the current climate continues. 'We have seen honour killings have happened, and there is no reason why this kind of thing cannot happen.'"
And we should remember that this is backed up by fiqh in all four main schools of interpretation."Islamic texts sold in Britain ... say the punishment for apostasy is death - according to all four schools of Islamic jurisprudence. One text called for Muslims to cut off the head of those who reject Islam."
Now there is a reassuring response to this: "Sheikh Mogra, a senior member of the Muslim Council for Britain, told Dispatches: 'We live in a country where we respect people's choices. It is not right for any British Muslim to harm in any way whatsoever; to bully them, to intimidate them, to threaten them, is all against Muslim law.'"
The problem with that answer is that it is a tactical answer not one of principle. The Sheikh is not contradicting sharia but using a different set of principles for circumstances where Muslims are not in power: it is a tactic to be employed pending Muslim dominance. What we need from major Muslim scholars is a new hermeneutic to support a principled freedom of religion and we need to see Muslim-majority governments acting on the basis of it. Until that happens we should take note of the experience of a convert away from Islam in Bradford, "They told me categorically had I been in an Islamic country - Pakistan, Middle East - that they would actually be the first to chop off my head", this kind of attitude needs to be delegitimised by ulema with sound and credible appeals to Islamic sources. Can it be done? I hope so, but my reading of the principles of Islamic fiqh seem to show that they've painted themselves into a corner on this and related issues. It's a case where I really wish that some of the counterfactual histories could have been the actual history.
Bishop warns that Muslims who convert risk being killed | UK News | The Observer:

Migration and prices

One of the topics on the GCSE syllabus for RE is race and migration is a subset of that. Here's a new argument to add to those already covered.

prices in a city with an average proportion of new immigrants were 2.6 percent lower in December 1990 than in cities where no immigrants settled.
While the effect was consistent for almost all product categories, Lach found that the immigration effect was significantly stronger for products for which FSU immigrants constituted a larger share of the market, such as pork and vodka.
As Lach argues, newly arrived immigrants may be more price sensitive because of lower income and lack of brand loyalty. Immigrants, who may initially be unemployed, may also have more time to compare prices, and stores will tend to lower their prices to attract these new customers.

Vowel Sounds Affect Our Perceptions Of Products

As someone who has been interested in language since a young age, I had already 'intuited' the thing about the meaning of vowel sounds in names, particularly the connotations in product names. It appears that some real research has been done on this.

Numerous prior studies have shown that the two types of vowel sounds tend to be associated with different concepts that are strikingly uniform, even across cultures. Front vowel sounds convey small, fast, or sharp characteristics, while back vowel sounds convey large, slow, or dull characteristics.

Exactly so; this confirms my intuition. So ...

participants preferred words with front vowel sounds when the product category was a convertible or a knife (by about a 2:1 margin), but preferred words with back vowel sounds when the product category was an SUV or hammer (again, by about a 2:1 margin).

Now I have to ask; how does this affect our perceptions of people, categories of people, and doctrines? The difference between predestination (with all those higher front vowels) and foreknowlege (with a two back vowels in stressed posititons) may be more than philosophical...
ScienceDaily: Oohs And Aahs: Vowel Sounds Affect Our Perceptions Of Products:

Stop piddling around with bits of change

The question is whether all the little 'easy steps to save the planet' ideas are good ideas or whether they are actually counter-productive by allowing the evasion of the bigger picture. George Marshall puts the latter case in the Guardian.

Their logic is as follows. Simple actions capture people's attention and provide an entry-level activity. Present people with the daunting big-ticket solutions and they turn away. Give them something easy and you have them moving in the right direction and, in theory, ready to make the step up to the next level.

That is the theory, but, as plentiful social research confirms, it doesn't work. For one thing, making the solutions easy is no guarantee that anyone will carry them out. The government spent £22m on the Do Your Bit campaign and has subsequently admitted that it produced no measurable change in personal behaviour.

And there is a greater danger that people might adopt the simple measures as a way to avoid making more challenging lifestyle changes. With recycling, Mori concluded that it was becoming an act of "totem behaviour" and that "individuals use recycling as a means of discharging their responsibility to undertake wider changes in lifestyle". In other words, people can adopt the simplest solutions as a part of a deliberate denial strategy that enables them to feel virtuous without changing their real behaviour.

Is feminism back from its holidays yet?

This article seems to me to put its finger on some important issues. Especially as I live some of the time in Newcastle, the party city, where the sight of assertive laddettes done up in attire suitable for some raunchy club is common at certain times of the evening and early morning. "It is no wonder a lot of men now genuinely believe that women want to be treated as sex objects. Who could blame them when so many of us have internalised an exhibitionistic ideal of our own objectification? You could argue, I suppose, that women who put headless photos of their naked torsos on to the internet are still suffering the legacy of millennia of male sexual oppression. But there must come a point where it is simply implausible to keep blaming men. 'The beauty industry is a monster, selling unattainable dreams. It lies, it cheats, it exploits women.' .... Postfeminists in the 90s assured women they could safely re-embrace their 'femininity' without sacrificing equality or credibility. And so manicures, and Brazilian bikini waxes and pole-dancing classes were all reintroduced under the guise of harmless girly 'fun'. Barely 10 years later, we look in the mirror and mistake ourselves for sex workers."

Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | No wonder men treat us as sex objects if we act like this:

saying what you mean: we do but in two channels.

Steven Pinker, who is often worth reading, wrestles with the problem of people and meaning. The thing is that when I read scientists doing this kind of thing, they seem to be two laps behind those who have been doing hermeneutics and semiotics for ages.
"Why don't people just say what they mean? The reason is that conversational partners are not modems downloading information into each other's brains. People are very, very touchy about their relationships. Whenever you speak to someone, you are presuming the two of you have a certain degree of familiarity--which your words might alter. So every sentence has to do two things at once: convey a message and continue to negotiate that relationship. ... "
Yep. And a good bible commentary will take you through that issue applied to biblical texts.
Edge 222:

Moral Psychology, religion and atheism

An article by Jonathan Haidt summarises briefly where moral psychology is up to and he gives his own overview thus [and the third one is most pertinent to my own research interest on human groups as emergent entities].
"I recently summarized this new synthesis in moral psychology with four principles: 1) Intuitive primacy but not dictatorship.... 2) Moral thinking is for social doing. ... reason is the servant of the passions. ... 3) Morality binds and builds.This is the idea stated most forcefully by Emile Durkheim that morality is a set of constraints that binds people together into an emergent collective entity. ... 4) Morality is about more than harm and fairness. ... I concluded that there were three best candidates for being additional psychological foundations of morality, beyond harm/care and fairness/justice. These three we label as ingroup/loyalty (which may have evolved from the long history of cross-group or sub-group competition, related to what Joe Henrich calls "coalitional psychology"); authority/respect (which may have evolved from the long history of primate hierarchy, modified by cultural limitations on power and bullying, as documented by Christopher Boehm), and purity/sanctity, which may be a much more recent system, growing out of the uniquely human emotion of disgust, which seems to give people feelings that some ways of living and acting are higher, more noble, and less carnal than others."
It's not a short article, so I won't quote huge chunks of it. It is clearly a matter that Christians need to be taking note of and assimilating into our own thinking about morality, ethics, apologetics, education, social thinking and so forth. You'll have to read the whole thing to get more detail. My hope is that I've quoted enought to give you an idea whether this is something you should follow up in more detail. The interesting thing is that Haidt then goes on to apply his insights to the 'religous wars' that are getting underway, apparently, between secular liberals and conservatives religious people. One of the ways he does this is to make a soft implication that atheism, because it is less 'natural' to humans is more rational and less driven by post-hoc justifications ["I will also take it for granted that religious fundamentalists, and most of those who argue for the existence of God, illustrate the first three principles of moral psychology (intuitive primacy, post-hoc reasoning guided by utility, and a strong sense of belonging to a group bound together by shared moral commitments)."]. I think that this is a different kind of tack to Dawkins et al for whom religiosity is tacked on to human thinking. Haidt seems to recognise it as more fundamental. However, he does recognise this may impose a higher standard for non-religious argumentation and says of Dawkins et al, "the presence of passions should alert us that the authors, being human, are likely to have great difficulty searching for and then fairly evaluating evidence that opposes their intuitive feelings about religion. ... To my mind an irony of Dawkins' position is that he reveals a kind of religious orthodoxy in his absolute rejection of group selection."

The conclusion to the article is also very interesting: "My point is just that every longstanding ideology and way of life contains some wisdom, some insights into ways of suppressing selfishness, enhancing cooperation, and ultimately enhancing human flourishing.

But because of the four principles of moral psychology it is extremely difficult for people, even scientists, to find that wisdom once hostilities erupt. A militant form of atheism that claims the backing of science and encourages "brights" to take up arms may perhaps advance atheism. But it may also backfire, polluting the scientific study of religion with moralistic dogma and damaging the prestige of science in the process."

Edge 222:

The take: the Argentinian experiment in workers' control

This is quite inspiring. What can happen when capital goes away leaving labour and an abandoned factory behind. I have to say that I'm not sympathetic to the boss who decides the factory is not profitable and abandons it, only to try to take it back when the workers manage to make a go of it.
DNAStream - Mutant Television

Free stock images

It appears to do what it says on the tin and they don't look too bad either (shades of previous experiences impinge). However, there is no apparent search facility. I have found these helpful on other sites like retrievr (searching by sketch) or images.com which has a word searchable facility.
FREE STOCK IMAGES

Questioning the Conventional

This quote points to something that, in reflective moments, I think that I have 'known' since I was quite young. I actually spent a lot of time wondering how to learn better and coming up with all sorts of tricks and cross-referencing techniques. I never felt these would be valued, but increasingly I am finding them being passed on at the edges of the education system. Anyway, here's the quote.
"Toward the end of his life, legendary mathematician Jacques Hadamard asked 100 of the top scientists of his time how they did whatever it was that they did (math, physics, etc.) Hadamard's survey found a massive disconnect between how we teach math and science and how mathematicians and scientists actually work. The majority of his contemporaries apparently claimed that using the logical, left-brain symbols associated with their work was NOT how they did their work. These were simply the tools they used to communicate it. What they used to do the works was much... fuzzier. Intuition. Visualization. Sensation (Einstein talked of a kinesthetic element). Anthropomorphizing. Metaphors."
Perhaps I should take seriously the way that I use imagery to think about space-time and God's relationship to it ...
IALA: What We Teach: Questioning the Conventional:

Liberals More Likely Than Conservatives To Break From Habitual Responses, Study Finds

I probably don't need to say much about this, but it's interesting. "Findings support previous suggestions that political orientation may in part reflect differences in cognitive mechanisms."
I suppose the question that lurks for me is how churches can hold together people whose cognitive mechanisms differ. While it is likely that individual congregations will reflect one style or another, how do we hold together over regions and internationally?
My other question is about how these cognitive mechanisms arise and how deeply rooted are they? In other words do people change them; indeed can they? Are we born conservative or liberal or is it a function of upbringing and education? I will clearly have to look out for other research. Any readers have any leads?

PS no sooner had I written this than my RSS feeds brought me this article which, if not answering the question, asks pertinent questions about methodology and concludes: "I am wondering whether the test actually captures not political opinion as such but the speed of assimilation and adaptation to one's environment. People who are at odds with their environment may need more structured thinking patterns in order to survive. In that case, we should expect to see the results reversed in Utah (where the liberal must keep repeating over and over, "small families are a blessing, small families are a blessing, gay is okay, gay is okay"). Perhaps someone will try it, if they haven't already."
Fair comment, and a timely reminder that checking methodologies is important in interpreting such data.
ScienceDaily: Liberals More Likely Than Conservatives To Break From Habitual Responses, Study Finds:

Health the Cuban way ...

According to the World Health Organisation a Cuban man can expect to live to 75 and a woman to 79. The probability of a child dying aged under five is five per 1,000 live births. That is better than the US and on a par with the UK. Yet these world-class results are delivered by a shoestring annual per capita health expenditure of $260 (£130) - less than a 10th of Britain's $3,065 and a fraction of America's $6,543. There is no mystery about Cuba's core strategy: prevention. From promoting exercise, hygiene and regular check-ups, the system is geared towards averting illnesses and treating them before they become advanced and costly.

The rest of the article is a helpful exploration of the factors that improve Cuban health. Not always what westerners want to hear: having to walk more because fuel is expensive and cars likewise.
It's valuable to be made to think about the interaction of social policy, attitudes, economy and health. For Christians this invokes the importance of seeing healing ministry whole: as potentially involving political decisions and changing systems (I think Bp Morris Maddocks made the same point in The Christian Healing Ministry and was it Cronin's The Citidal that has two doctors dynamiting the towns drainage system in order to force the council to rebuild them and so liberate the town from cholera or typhoid?)
First world results on a third world budget, Guardian.

Dawkins' atheism really is fundamentalist

I felt I ought to reference this little interview with Alistair McGrath on the subject of Richard Dawkins' atheism. In it McGrath makes a number of good points. I particularly warmed to these which are concerns of mine about Dawkins' brand of atheism.

Dawkins has his own definition of faith - "blind trust, in the absence of evidence, even in the teeth of evidence”, or as a “process of non-thinking”. Needless to say, these are highly pejorative, and don't correspond to what Christians actually think. Countless Christian writers - from Thomas Aquinas to C. S. Lewis to Josh McDowell - have emphasized that faith is based on evidence; that faith makes sense; and that faith can be defended in the public arena. Dawkins seems determined to portray people who believe in God as non-thinking. In doing so, he ends up in a hopeless mess, failing to distinguish between "religion" and "belief in God", and - maybe more importantly - between "a religion" and "a worldview".

Dawkins fails to take seriously how worldviews - such as Nazism or Stalinism - can lead people to acts of extremism and violence. He's so convinced that only religion causes these problems that he fails to look long and hard at the evidence. Most tellingly, he substitutes creedal statements for evidence-based arguments at this point. Here's an example: “I do not believe there is an atheist in the world who would bulldoze Mecca – or Chartres, York Minster, or Notre Dame.” Now this noble sentiment is a statement about his personal credulity, not about the reality of things. The history of the Soviet Union is replete with the burning and dynamiting of huge numbers of churches, not to mention the persecution of Christian clergy. Dawkins's naïve plea that atheism is innocent of the violence and oppression that he associates with religion is simply untenable, and suggests a significant blind spot on his part.

tothesource

Happy Creationtide

The Second Ecumenical European Assembly adopted the following resolution: "We recommend that the churches consider and promote the preservation of Creation as part of church life at all levels. One way would be to observe a common creation day, such as the Ecumenical Patriarchate celebrates each year. Rationale: The seriousness of the ecological dilemma for the future of the human race means that churches' consciousness of it must be raised. Commitment to preservation of the creation is not an issue among many others but an essential dimension of all church life.'"

It was part of the document which can be downloaded here (allowing you to see it in context):
Care for God’s Creation, A Discussion Guide for the Third European Ecumenical Assembly in Sibiu I'm a big fan of the idea; when I was in University chaplaincy I experimented with it: after all the university year is hard to process liturgically alongside the regular year. So in our chaplaincy we began with a season of creation-related Sundays (after a couple of welcome-related ones) with a focus on creation care, eco-footprints, counter-consumerism etc. I'm just wondering now how to bring it into the Common Lectionary ... [goes away musing].
Htt CEL

Write a perfect email

It's worthwhile thinking about how to write good emails, especially when you have a lot to write. I was feeling chuffed that a lot of the advice here was already stuff I'd kind of worked out. Here's the rules according to Wired: "Brevity ... You may have lots of information to share, but in email you are in a long list of others competing for your recipient’s attention. Keeping it brief is a sign of respect
Context ... If I don’t know you by name, tell me how you came to contact me. We talked about mixers at a podcasting meetup. You saw a panel I was on last year.... have a subject line. One that makes sense...
Something to act on. Make your requests clear. ... You should set them apart from the rest of the message by paring them down to one sentence, with white space before and after ... if you can frame the question such that a lengthy answer isn’t required, you’re apt to get a quicker response.
A deadline. There comes a time when the response you seek is no longer useful. If you know when that is, tell your recipient. This can be a good way both to prompt a speedy turnaround, and to let people off the hook in the long term."

And while we're on the subject, I reckon this one deserves further thought: "The Problem
E-mail takes too long to respond to, resulting in continuous inbox overflow for those who receive a lot of it.
The Solution Treat all email responses like SMS text messages, using a set number of letters per response. Since it’s too hard to count letters, we count sentences instead.
five.sentenc.es is a personal policy that all email responses regardless of recipient or subject will be five sentences or less. It’s that simple."

Write a perfect email / Wired How To's

US readers only need apply ...

I know from my site stats that there are quite a number of US readers to this blog who've stayed loyal despite my occasional ribbings. I came across this recently and wondered ...

If you're a speaker of American English with no experience of life in the United Kingdom, here's a quiz question (this is not for you if you live in Britain; to you it will seem absurdly easy).
Choose the correct meaning for the phrase "white goods" from the following list of potential meanings:
1. Goods of any sort that are white in color — flour, paper towels, lilies, emulsion paint, toothpaste, ermine fur, milk, eggs, refined sugar, button mushrooms, etc.
2. Goods that carry no duty and can thus be freely imported and carried through customs without officials needing to be in any way concerned with them.
3. Garments typically or traditionally made with undyed white cotton, such as plain dress shirts, underwear, tennis shorts, cricket clothes, and so on.
4. Goods that are fully legal, in the sense of being properly imported with duties properly paid rather than being part of the so-called "black economy".
5. Office paper, letter envelopes, and similar white paper office supplies.
6. Household appliances such as washing machines or refrigerators that are often painted white.
7. Linen household goods such as sheets, pillow cases, and towels.
8. Goods of a sort determined by market research to be primarily of interest to customers of European rather than African or Asian origins.
9. Goods deemed by government regulatory agencies to be (unlike an increasing number of toys and other products from the People's Republic of China) free of harmful features and fully fit for sale to the general public.
10. Milk, buttermilk, yoghurt, and other non-cheese liquid dairy products.
...I'll leave a few days for you to do your own guessing and to test monolingual American friends, relatives, and colleagues to see what percentage of them can guess the correct meaning (they are not allowed to do any Googling or Wikipediery before answering, of course

Want to be in on this experiment? Then check out language log

The terrier who got his teeth into God

Interesting comment from an agnostic commenting on the kinds of positions he found certain atheists taking which he thought were "“grotesque" why? "...for clever people like Dawkins” to present themselves as some kind of martyrs for the atheist cause. “Nobody is denying them their atheism and nobody has done for a very long time in this country. I doubt whether any of Dawkins’s immediate relatives have been burnt at the stake. Hitchens presents religion as not just wrongheaded but as something so dangerous it must be eradicated. And then they say even these people who profess to be believers actually know it’s not true. How dare they? That’s unacceptable. I think it’s dishonest.”
Of course this is the reflex of the Theists etc thinking it's only and always obduracy and rebellion that motivates atheism (and that atheists really 'know' there's a God). Of course sometimes it is, often though, it's not.
And both positions are a bit like believing in our heart of hearts that foreigners really speak English; they just talk French or whatever to be awkward or to exclude us.
The terrier who got his teeth into God:

WORLD TO APEC: HOPE IS NOT ENOUGH!

Please consider adding your name to the petition WORLD TO APEC: HOPE IS NOT ENOUGH!

New nuclear row as green groups pull out

In a consultative democracy it's the people who frame the questions who hold the power. And that issue seems to be at the heart of a report that could herald the formal withdrawal of a green coalition from UK gov's consultation on nuclear power. The report "accuses the government of 'conducting a public relations stitch-up designed to deliver a preordained policy on new nuclear power' and 'rushing' a consultation process that its advisers say should take at least nine months. 'The new consultation is no different from the government's previous attempt at a nuclear consultation,' it says. 'It skirts over the many negative aspects of nuclear power, such as its enormous cost, what to do with all the radioactive waste new build will create, and how little nuclear power will do to help cut carbon emissions and guarantee energy security.' The document continues: 'It has become clear that the government has already made up its mind ... and that this new consultation is nothing more than an expensive sham.'"
Of course the difficulty is that it could simply be written off as a fit of pique at not getting their own way: however, we should note that this is about feeling they have been heard and that their position is articulated fairly. It's a fundamental rule of mediation and conciliation that each side is 'heard'. And at this point the purpose of the consultation is surely to let the arguments be heard properly and that means that each side should feel that they have been represented fairly.
New nuclear row as green groups pull out | Environment | The Guardian

Save YouTube Videos To Your Hard Drive

If only I'd known this a few months back when trying to find video clips to use in class and having a school version of net nanny that simply disallowed any and all sites such as YouTube. So to have been able to download some stuff at home and take it in would have been great.

There's no direct or easy way to download YouTube videos from the site, but thankfully there are ways to make a local copy for personal use.

Save YouTube Videos To Your Hard Drive / Wired How To's:

Pressure point attacks - Warfare in a cyber age

It appears we are at war with China, have been for years. "such attacks reflected a new doctrine of the PLA described as 'pressure point warfare' - the attacking of specific nodes to leave the adversary paralysed. ... the PLA keen to flex its muscles, Mr Neill suggested. 'The Chinese see no difference between asymmetric warfare and conventional warfare'."

The point is that the Pentagon systems have been penetrated on at least one occasion and Whitehall has been attacked too. MAkes me still more reluctant to see my data held by a central government system!
Titan Rain - how Chinese hackers targeted Whitehall | Technology | The Guardian:

The wiki way or how the internet changes things

Previewing a new book, we learn of this case-study in internet business. "

Goldcorp did use the internet to mine gold: in 2000, it abandoned the industry's tradition of secrecy, making thousands of pages of complex geological data available online, and offering $575,000 in prize money to those who could successfully identify where on the Red Lake property the undiscovered veins of gold might lie. Retired geologists, graduate students and military officers around the world chipped in. They recommended 110 targets, half of which Goldcorp hadn't previously identified. Four-fifths of them turned out to contain gold. Since then, the company's value has rocketed from $100m to $9bn, and disaster has been averted.

Now the really intriguing and insightful thing is this:

The received wisdom, among western economists, was that individuals should compete in a free market: planned economies, such as Stalin's, were doomed. But in that case, why did huge companies exist, with centralised operations and planning? The Ford Motor Company was hailed as a paragon of American business, but wasn't the Soviet Union just an attempt to run a country like a big company? If capitalist theory was correct, why didn't Americans, or British people, just do business with each other as individual buyers and sellers in the open market, instead of organising themselves into firms? The answer - which won Coase a Nobel prize - is that making things requires collaboration, and finding and linking up all the people who need to collaborate costs money. Companies emerge when it becomes cheaper to gather people, tools and material under one roof, rather than to go out looking for the best deal every time you need a few hours' labour, or a part for a car. But the internet, Tapscott argues, is radically lowering the cost of collaborating. Companies - certainly big companies - are losing their raison d'etre.

An example is given of the Chinese motorcycle industry:

A "self-organised system of design and production" has emerged - the kind of system we usually associate with phenomena in cyberspace, like Wikipedia, or software released without copyright, so that others can tweak and improve it, such as the web browser Firefox. The Chinese motorcycle industry, in other words, is "open source".

A really intriguing article which may just be flagging up an important future trend of some significance. Me? I'm looking at getting the book.

The wiki way | Technology | Guardian Unlimited:

The Fat Cats Protection League

I seem to recall saying something similar to this that appears in George Monbiot's latest: "the neoliberal project - which demands a minimal state and maximum corporate freedom - actually relies on constant government support."
In fact my point has been wider: that neoliberal society actually relies on a host of 'unliberal' and unacknowledged supports to keep it going: it is in fact parasitic on certain kinds of infrastructure but tends to make rude comments when other people try to have more advantageous infrastructures.
As George points out "The current financial crisis, caused by a failure to regulate financial services properly, is being postponed by government bail-outs. The US Federal Reserve has reduced its lending rate to the commercial banks, while the Bundesbank organised a E3.5bn rescue of the lending company IKB. This happens whenever the banks suffer the consequences of the freedom they demand."
Indeed. They have us by the short and curlies. 'We' can't afford for them to go under, so all of a sudden, in financial crisis they become state-subsidised: where did all that talk of the market, fitness and competition go? We are all state-interventionists when it's to our advantage!
Monbiot then goes on to talk about the PFI fiasco through a case study of a hospital in Derby. It only serves to drive deeper for me the question of how having to pay shareholders in addition to normal costs can make a project cheaper.
Monbiot.com � The Fat Cats Protection League:

The Language Construction Kit

I don't get the time to do it now, but I have been a language constructor in the past and would still do it if I didn't have a big list of other things to do. So I'm noting this website to help 'language hobbyists', in case one day I'm looking for extra resources. I've given it the once over, and the claim it makes ("It presents linguistically sound methods for creating naturalistic languages") seems to be right. And it does what it says here too: "It suggests further reading for those who want to know more"
The Language Construction Kit:

Psychiatrists Are The Least Religious Of All Physicians

I'm not surprised to discover that research shows this: "'Something about psychiatry, perhaps its historical ties to psychoanalysis and the anti-religious views of the early analysts such as Sigmund Freud, seems to dissuade religious medical students from choosing to specialize in this field,' said study author Farr Curlin, MD, assistant professor of medicine at the University of Chicago. 'It also seems to discourage religious physicians from referring their patients to psychiatrists.'"
Though the latter bit was more of a surprise. Though I'm not sure how worried I would be by it. The psychiatric approach is dodgy, I gather, in terms of results. Things like CBT and counselling seem more effective than analysis.
I also suspect that the researcher's guess as to why is probably right: "Patients probably seek out, to some extent, physicians who share their views on life's big questions,"
I suspect that many religious people have a suspicion that their faith would be viewed as a neurosis or somesuch and so would not wish to fight that battle with a therapist when they are seeking help with something else.
ScienceDaily: Psychiatrists Are The Least Religious Of All Physicians:

Clean Up Fashion

This looks useful: "This website aims to give you the information you need to be an active consumer. Click on a shop and find out all about that company. Use it to tell the companies what you think, support the workers who make your clothes, inform your friends and family and help us to Clean up Fashion."
Worth bookmarking.
Clean Up Fashion - Home:

‘Atheist’ Worship

You know, at times, I know just how this feels: "Sometimes, I feel like an atheist amid worship. The songs being sung earnestly around me are about a god I don’t really believe in anymore. As Shane Claiborne asked, does God really have lightning in his fists, or is this Zeus we’re talking about? “God, rid me of ‘god,’” Meister Eckhart prayed. Many times this is my silent prayer amid circles of saints singing their hearts out to a deity I scarcely recognize."
And sometimes doubly so when someone is trying to lead me from the front into expressions of worship that just jar with where I'm at fairly fundamentally or are culturally miles from me.
THe rest of this post is worth looking at, and although the quality of the video is not all I would want, it is a kind of proof of concept. I would want to underline the idea of writing stuff that's outside of the contemporary praise band repertoire of half-digested biblical imagery with Disney soundtracks. I've occasionally tried to do something about it myself. Here's one attempt that I'm not too unhappy with and have used a few times.
‘Atheist’ Worship � zoecarnate:

How green are our bananas?

I find myself to be a bit of a wet environmentalist, in the sense that the issues are actually sufficiently complex that desirable actions can work against each other, so we have to make a decision based on the best we can know. And it's interesting to see this kind of thing flagged up by the Co-op supermarket as they go to consult their customers, who are often, like me, members/shareholders (that being the point of a co-op). See here:

Paul Monaghan, the Co-Op's head of ethics, who designed the survey, pinpointed the new aeroplane stickers used on air-freighted exotic fruit and flowers, recently introduced by Marks & Spencer and Tesco, as a key example of the sort of 'lazy thinking' the Co-op wanted its shoppers to understand, and which the retailer would never support because of the detrimental effect on growers and farmers in less developed countries. 'The drive to reduce 'food miles' and reduce carbon dioxide could have real social impacts on third world growers as supply chains are redirected more locally,' he said. 'The carbon produced by Kenyan roses is a fifth of that used to grow Dutch roses because of the heating and lighting.'

It's not just localism, though that can be important, it's not just development and fair trade, it's trying to balance all these things before God. It's the region of Wisdom, that art of understanding not just facts but having a sense of how best or better to act upon them and having the humility to be corrigible.
Reading the following made me proud to be a member of the co-op (even if they won't take me divi card in Scotland):

The Co-op has a history of leading the debates on how retailers should address ethical trading and their environmental impact. It was the first major retailer to champion the Fairtrade label, when it put Cafédirect coffee on its shelves in 1992, and introduced the UK's first Fairtrade bananas in 2000. It still claims to sell a wider range of Fairtrade goods than any other retailer.

Anyway, it'll be interesting to see what the survey comes up with. Watch this space, well, this blog anyhow.
How green do you want your bananas? Co-op ballots members on ethical issues | Environment | The Guardian:

The wages of corporate sin ...

It's what some expected, some feared and most would like not to know. Major British clothes retailers (and therefore almost certainly this applies to North American retailers and the rest of the EU) have had their supply chains investigated and ... "wages paid to garment workers were as low as £1.13 for a nine-hour day. This fails to meet their basic needs, according to factory workers and Indian unions and so falls below the minimum international labour standards promised by the Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI), a code of conduct which sets out basic rights for employees across the supply chain. Marks & Spencer is a member of the ETI, as are Mothercare, Gap and Primark."
To find the report and the organisations behind it visit here.
The sweatshop high street - more brands under fire | Business | Guardian Unlimited Business:

Genetic fallacy again: yoga for toddlers

Another example of the genetic fallacy in relation to things tarred with the new age brush.

“Any alternative philosophies or beliefs are offering a sham - and at St James’s Church we want people to have the real thing. Yoga has its roots in Hinduism, and attempts to use exercises and relaxation techniques to put a person into a calm frame of mind - in touch with some kind of impersonal spiritual reality."

I've actually blogged about this kind of thing before. In relation explicitly to yoga (do read the comments too), and this one in raising an oft-related issue, and in relation to acupuncture, it's a shame that it is hindering mission.
Vicars ban ‘un-Christian’ yoga for toddlers:

The Pit of Despair

One of the things I enjoy about Princess Bride is that the main parts are taken by relatively unknown actors, and then there is this thing going on with rather better-known actors in cameo roles...

YouTube - The Pit of Despair

Miracle Max

Oh! And here's another fave scene from That Film. This time Billy Crystal plays a blinder with some priceless one liners.

YouTube - Miracle Max

Princess Bride clips

At last: I've found You Tube has clips from my favourite film: the Princess Bride. This is one of my favourite scenes.

YouTube - Princess Bride
It is, as you can tell, the source of the quote about land war in Asia: advice that goes for playing Risk too!

Just recently, I attended a very serious service in a cathedral, unfortunately having to stifle my giggles because one of the service leaders sounded rather like this ...
And it shows, btw, surely Andre the Giant's (RIP) best role.

Married Men Really Do Do Less Housework

... than 'live-in boyfriends'. Grouch Marx is supposed to have quipped that marriage is a great institution -but who wants to live in an institution? Well, the answer would seem to be that women (and men) who want an equal approach to housework, at least according to the findings of this large sample and cross-cultural study:

"it suggests the institution of marriage changes the division of labor. Couples with an egalitarian view on gender--seeing men and women as equal--are more likely to divide the household chores equally. However, in married relationships, even if an egalitarian viewpoint is present, men still report doing less housework than their wives. 'Marriage as an institution seems to have a traditionalizing effect on couples--even couples who see men and women as equal,' "

I'm actually not surprised: the mental schemas about marriage are implied and passed on tacitly through many sources, little wonder they should have an effect in actual behaviour in the agregate at least. The interesting thing is the cohabitation dimension. There are those who reject traditional marriage precisely because of the inequalities. I didn't have too much sympathy with that viewpoint until a read this; but not I think I'm getting it more. It's a challenge to Christians who genuine do believe in an egalitarian approach; the weight of tradition may be prooving to be a dead-weight in our attempts to reform the institution. Perhaps it is time for us to take more seriously what we mean by marriage in a social context that seems almost irreformably unequal ... In fact, do we really want 'marriage' in the terms it has been handed down to us? And if not, how do we take on the task of adjusting to or from the social psychology of it?

ScienceDaily: Married Men Really Do Do Less Housework Than Live-in Boyfriends:

Brains, obe's and spiritual experience.

Denyse O'Leary naturally and rightly picks up this story to comment on "Scientists have deliberately fooled people into feeling they are watching themselves from outside their own bodies, using virtual-reality technology. The achievement reveals how the brain can be confused as it struggles to integrate confusing information from the different senses. " and she makes some good points in response. However, I missed one of the obvious retorts to the materialist/reductionist reading: that is that if there are such things as spiritual experiences, the only way we could 'process' them would be via our neural systems: hence the use of various physical techniques to simulate them in the brain does not disprove the reality of the simulated any more than stimulating optical phenomena via electrodes disproves eyesight. ... does it?
Mindful Hack: Simulated out-of-body experiences - what difference do they make to our view of the soul?:

MBTI -the dark side

Even though reading A Mind of its Own has made me a little more wary of Myers-Briggs typing, I still recognise that using it has been very helpful to me and to others I've seen in a spiritual direction capacity over the last few years. So this take on it has to be in the mix. Here's the dystopic version of my profile /type this is clearly an important counterweight to the MBTI tendency to be really positive about its typing. It's about time we had a downsider version. I've highlighted the especially applicable!

ENTP: The Mad Scientist

The ENTP, like the ENTJ, is charismatic, outgoing, and intelligent. ENTPs are often quickwitted, clever, and genial; they typically display a highly organized, rational cognitive ability which makes them natural scientists and inventors.

ENTPs are creative, complex people who seek to improve their understanding of the natural world, usually by building armored fifty-story-tall robotic monsters with iron jaws and death-ray eyes, or by creating genetically mutated plagues that spread unstoppably across the land, turning all who are contaminated into mindless zombie drones. They are less likely to want to conquer the world than to destroy it utterly, reducing it to nothing but slag and rubble--though this is often merely a side-effect of their pursuit of knowledge.

RECREATION: ENTPs enjoy recreational activities which challenge them physically and intellectually, such as water skiing and porting Linux to their iPods. They are also fond of collecting gadgets like combination cellpone/PDAs and orbiting arsenals of brain lasers, which they may port Linux to as well.

COMPATIBILITY: ENTPs and ENTJs make natural companions, as the one's unspeakable hunger for power complements the other's unspeakable hunger for knowledge. They do not generally build successful relationships with ESFJs, as ENTPs they are prone to behaving in inconveniently erratic ways, which pisses ESFJs off to no end; and because ENTPs simply do not know how to dress appropriately for formal occasions.

Famous ENTPs include Spencer Silver (the inventor of Post-It Notes), Robert Oppenheimer, and Dr. Jeckyll.

Glad to have got that off my chest.

Htt.