Video gamers aggress non-human opponents less

I think that this might be relevant to the subject matter I've been exploring in relation to forgiveness and atonement: :

"The more human players perceived the aggressive targets to be, the more verbally aggressive they were and the more violent words they generated," the study says. "Although we predicted that less human targets would result in more aggression, players seemed to be more aggressive after perceiving more human targets."
Human-like opponents lead to more aggression in video game players

 You may recall that I suggested in exploring anger that taking it 'personally' was a key factor in generating a sense of having been wronged as opposed to simply suffering an accidental detriment. I suspect that this finding supports or corroborates that. If it is the case that we react more angrily when we think we're deliberately being targetted for harm by someone with intent to do us down, then we might expect that the more we can recognise our harmer as having agency, the more likely we are to 'take it personally'. So it seems that non-human 'agents' are quite likely to be perceived as less agentive, less 'personal' -and so less deserving of us taking it personally.

Now, I don't know how, if at all, this relates to kicking the cat (that famous scenario of taking it out on something else non-human -which I don't condone btw) or whether it makes ET's safer from us. It might be interesting to compare/contrast this with the greater ease of unleashing lethal force against those we don't see in front of us (think drones and IBMs) -but that seems to be related to reducing the possibility of empathy rather than upping the ante on aggression.

I take it for granted that video gaming in this respect uses the same brain 'circuitry' as actual aggressive acts and that the interpretive 'circuitry' is the same as in real life. So at an emotional level there is little differenc between a fantasy situation and a real life one.

Why is gay sex biblically condemned? Not your usual answer ...

I was wondering what I was going to read when Matt Stone drew attention to this article by  Nigel Chapman
Gay Sex for Evangelicals - Chapman-2013_Gay-Sex-For-Evangelicals_v1-4_26-April_final.pdf: I thought it might be a simple restatement of what is currently the usual evangelical stuff on the issue, but as it was Matt, I wondered. Have a look, but if you want a sense of why,

 To answer my starting question: Why is gay sex biblically condemned? Because it is profoundly abhorrent and immoral in the cases which scripture addresses, and for the reasons which it gives. But as Romans 1 makes clear, the case we must address is different. When the reasons that establish immorality and abhorrence in the biblical cases are applied to permanent and involuntary same-sex attraction (orientation) and faithful and monogamous same-sex unions (gay
marriage), then we see a clear and clarifying pattern: the reasons that condemn do not apply, and
the reasons that apply do not condemn. Biblically, this case is not the good but unattainable ideal. But just as biblically, it’s not a moral evil. We should stop treating it like one

  It doesn't deal with the argument drawn from Genesis 1 and 2 but others have done that. See here. Also commend this book for a closer examination of the other exegetical issues.

Attack of the the Grammar Nazis: here's the Home Guard

Although it might be fun to weigh in on the matter picked out by this headline:
Academics chastised for bad grammar in letter attacking Michael Gove, I'm actually more interested in why the chastisers, the judges of the inaugural Bad Grammar awards. "The award is intended to draw attention to "the worst use of English over the last 12 months by people who should know better".

Now there's something wrong right there before we even get into the detail. It's the phrase 'should know better'. In other words, we are being introduced to the land of privilege and put-down and language is being rolled out as a way to mark who is 'one of us' and who is not. This is an exercise in group elitism and looking down ones nose at 'those people'. So let's immediately be prepared to ignore or even mock some of what they say. We should recall that, in effect, this is users of Elite English asserting their supposed superiority.

In fact not everything the judges say is wrong-headed: sometimes we do need to pay attention to how written language has to work in distinction to spoken, and that means learning things about how to signal words are grouped or actually not grouped, so the use of commas and hyphens and even apostrophes is quite useful for such things. However, there are signs that a lot of what this is about is pet peeves by grammar nazis motivated by a vision of language purity every bit as abitrary and prejudiced as racism.

Apparently Tesco are wrong for "using adjectives as nouns". You mean like national monuments "To the fallen" and the like? Selectivity, I think. Common shopfloor use -bad: national monument use -good.

And I have to confess I couldn't work out what this was referring to:
Transport for London was attacked for "mixing gerunds and infinitives on a safety sign. I'm finding it hard to imagine what that is referring to. But the point would be that if it communicates well-enough to the majority of users, then it is good enough and that would imply that it is using grammar in a way that is understandable to that majority. Since right and wrong in language actually only ever are to do with agreed conventions and statistical likelihood, this means that is it is probably nonsensical to describe it as wrong. I suspect that what is meant is something like "not our cup of tea in the phraseology department, don't you know". Though I'm prepared to learn that in an attempt at succinctness, just like newspaper headlines, a crash blossom has occured. The annoying thing about this particular award is that the examples don't seem to be online.

"Gwynne's attack opened with a consideration of the phrase "demands too much too young"."
Well clearly that sentence is understandable by even the detractors, which indicates that there is something about the way it is structured that 'makes sense'. So don't let's give in to suggestions that it is ungrammatical, perhaps 'differently grammared' from Elite English. Here's what is said about that phrase.

"Presumably they mean something like 'demands too much when children are too young to be ready for so much', but, as worded, it simply is not English," he said. "In that sentence as worded, 'too young' can only be two adverbs, 'too' qualifying the adverb 'young', and 'young' qualifying the verb 'demands', as would, for instance, 'soon' or 'early'. But 'young' is an adjective, and cannot ever be an adverb. And it certainly is not doing the work of an adjective in that sentence, because there is no noun that could be 'understood' and which would turn that sentence into English."

 I think we're actually dealing with elipsis here. "Too young" clearly refers to (presumably) antecedantly mentioned 'children' and so is understood adjectivally. Admittedly the phrase is pushing at the boundaries of understandable (see what I did there?), but to attempt to woodenly analyse 'young' as adverbial, relating to 'demands' is a sort of over-literal and under-imaginitive thing to do. The fact that the antecedant 'children' is not in the sentence is neither here nor there. If they are live in the mind because they are the topic of this bit of the discourse, then it is normal for English speakers to miss out saying or writing something like Nevile Gwynne's own reconstruction: "[when children are] too young [to be ready for so much]". Gwynne seems to be calling for a mandatory 11 words when 2 will do. The ease with which he appears to have (re)constructed the fuller phrase demonstrates that the linguistic tactic the writers used actually works. Hoist by his own petard.

He goes on:

"In the second clause, 'Little account is taken' is understood before the words 'that young children need'," he said. "But there is no such verb as 'to take account' but only 'to take account of' as in the first clause of that sentence. The second clause of the sentence is simply illiterate."

 So the whole phrase is 'Little account is taken that young children need'. Except that you can't insert an 'of' in that phrase. One tactic would be to rephrase: perhaps '.. is taken of the fact that ...'. but that's a bit clumsy, so attempting to use the usual 'verb + that + phrase' is smoother. I confess that it isn't a form I would naturally use, but it is a usage which is understandable and if picked up by a number of English speakers could become quite unremarkable. I suspect for many it already is. In a sense it's a new grammatical rule about dropping prepositions in such phrases. It's not that it's wrong; it's that it is new and jars on the expectations of Elite-English speakers

In the end, we should be focussing not on conformity with Elite-English as defined by these upper-middle class professionals, but on clarity. And (see what I did there?) clarity can be bad even when grammar is 'good'. To be sure many 'ordinary' English speakers need to learn Elite-English, but not to be correct. Rather they/we need to learn it in order to fit in, make arguments and otherwise extract value from the elite. We need to play their game sometimes, but it doesn't mean they're right, merely powerful.

I would like to give a couple of cheers to Michael McCarthy, emeritus professor of applied linguistics at the University of Nottingham, who said "I think we should be concerned when things overstep certain marks but... English grammar... is actually a plurality of grammars (from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-22378402). Well said. Plurality will entail difference.

Well, let's have a look at a few infelicities here. Same topic but this time comment by Michael Moran. "Bad grammar. We all know it when we hear it, but we don't necessarily know why." Well, clearly that's not true: who is this 'we' because some people don't heare what Elite-English users hear as ungrammatical. And yet, strangely, 'they' hear Elite-English usages as strange and unwieldy and reeking of privilege and snobbery. In 'their' terms those usages are ungrammatical and lack street cred. Genuinely ungrammatical sentences we do know and the reason we wouldn't know why is that the bit of our minds and brains that processes language is not, in most people, connected up to the verbalising-rationalising bits. And, incidentally, in terms of Elite-English, the sentence "Bad Grammar." is not a grammatical sentence; there is no verb in the sentence. Ironic, eh?

At least Michael Moran tries to acknowledge that there's a degree of social relativity involved even if he can't quite let go of the notions of right and wrong in grammar understood in the traditionalist sense that he unsuccessfully tries to distance himself from.

It's just mild hothousing when I correct my daughter's grammar, but it would be pretty annoying if I were to chide adults for writing "should of". Telling strangers in a pub that they should say "she was sitting" rather than "she was sat" would probably result in a glassing.

 Well, we've got some confusions there. 'Should of' is a misanalysis of speech sounds ("should've" would save the day): not strictly a grammatical error: the speaker would still be using a perfect tense modified by a modal verb; they've just spelt it wrong. To be sure it (the spelling) could be corrected by becoming aware of the grammatical structure of what they've written, but they are clearly using a modally-modified perfect tense.

'Was sat' is just normal in some forms of English. In any case, it could be analysed as emphasising the seatedness of the person in question; in my understanding of the sentence, there is a semantic difference to 'was sitting'.

But, oh dear ... "I picked up some useful stuff about split infinitives from reading Clive James's reviews of Star Trek in the Observer". Because, of course, there is no such thing as a split infinitive strictly; two words are made to be split in a way that a single Latin word isn't. Add to that the fact that Shakespeare, Jane Austen, the Brotes and other members of the EngLit canon did use English in a way that sometimes inserted adverbs between the antecedant 'to' and a following verb 'stem', and we can see that this 'proper' English is very silly indeed.

Now I like his attempt to make a politically correct argument which makes it sound all compassionate:

Right now unprecedented numbers of non-native English speakers are living in Britain. They have learned their English from textbooks, not from birth as I did. They'll probably never think in English.
Most of us know the stress of translating on-the-fly when we're on holiday. Imagine feeling that pressure for the rest of your life. Removing the stabilisers of grammar from the bike of language isn't clever – it's cruel.

The problem is that it doesn't work. The kinds of things he is concerned about in usage of English are not, on the whole about having no grammar but rather having different grammar or making spelling errors based on sound. So there's no question about 'removing the stabilisers of grammar' -its more like which brand of stabilisers you have. The only language users who don't use grammar appear to be chimpanzees who have learnt sign langugae signs. They consistently fail to get syntax; they just string two or three signs together haphazardly and let context be our guide.

And finally, he writes "at some point in the future, voice command is likely to overtake keyboard input as our primary method of controlling computers. It's sensible to remove ambiguity from language as much we can before we reach that point. " Well, as I've pointed out earlier, at least some of what he has picked up is actually spelling errors which, presumably, a speech-to-text machine would deal with. As to the 'ambiguity' issue, well that's the case with whatever variety of English, and in fact most of the difficulties we have in writing are pretty much disambiguated by the intonation and phrasing of spoken language. And in any case, the point about human machine interfaces is to get to the point where we don't need to train the humans to use the machines, because the machines will understand the humans -in several dialects if necessary.

Have people stopped singing in church?

Now this is USAmerican by context, but relates to a phenomemon that 'New Churches' in GBlighty probably share; certainly I can see the like in churches I've been visiting in the last year or so. The blog post linked to is also one focussing on men in church so the issue presented is Why men have stopped singing in church: but it is probably wider than men, and in fact the matter is framed first in terms of 'people'.

It starts from an informal observation that people, including men, have stopped singing. It offers a few possible reasons, the most important being this:

 Songs get switched out so frequently today that it’s impossible to learn them. People can’t sing songs they’ve never heard. And with no musical notes to follow, how is a person supposed to pick up the tune?

 The follow-on point is that this reduces participation and that this is a bad thing.
I think that the lack of participation is a point of concern, and agree that this might be so especially in relation to men. However, I think also that the un-learnt-ness of the songs may not be quite as big an issue as suggested. 

In my experience of a few band-led services in different churches over the last year or so, I have been exposed to a variety of songs that were new to me. I didn't find them hard to learn on the fly, for the most part: first of all they were often repeated enough for me to get the hang of the main features, but then (secondly) I could in any case easily predict most of the turns of musical phrase since they were written in a very predictable MOR rock style with common chord sequences. Heck, I could even harmonise lines on the spot without having heard them before!

So, I'd have to say that I don't think that learning new songs is really at issue here if people aren't singing. So what might be? I have a couple of hypotheses. One is to do with the style and sentimentality of the music and lyrics and the other is to do with the presentational format.

I have tended to come away from services like this feeling that I've spent a lot of time in a MOR, soft-rock zone with a penchant for Disney-esque big numbers. I've also felt that the lyricisation was on the whole rather restricted, general, cliche'd and rarely poetic. It all felt overall as if the music and lyrics could have been written by a modestly sophisticated computer algorithm. And I think that this saccharinity could be one reason why some people (maybe proportionally more men) don't sing along: it feels too bland, it puts sentiments into their mouths that they are not sure about.

However, I don't think that hypothesis is so strong: I think for the sake of community many people will sing along even if they aren't with the programme in their hearts. Although if you get a critical mass of non-singers then it's more likely that others will feel they don't have to join in or even that joining in is bad form. In fact this latter point may point to a stronger reason: cultural priming.

The whole set up of putting a band on a stage, up front, and using contemporary instruments and styles says, culturally, "concert". And so a whole set of associations, connotations and expectations are cued up. Among these is that it is largely a spectator event where occasionally people might join in if they felt like it.

There are two more theological issues involved here. One is about the nature of leadership and participation. The semiotic value of the band approach is in effect, I would suggest, the priestification of the band, especially the leader/s. And this raises all the usual issues about every-member ministry, parity of esteem and so on. The band puts a bunch of people on a pedastal and magnifies their ministry. A worrying subtext of this could be to devalue other ministries by comparison, and my concern here is not only for teaching and learning but also for ministries 'in the world': worship becomes a very restricted concept which doesn't take in service in the world (for more on this, see the argument in God Against Religion) restricting worship not only to what goes on in church but, even more, to what the band leads.

The other matter is to do with what should be at the liturgical heart of worship. Singing/music has become, it seems to me, another sacrament. And one without scriptural support. Yes there are a couple of Pauline passages that encourage singing, but this hardly weighs equally with 'do this in remembrance of me'. I fear that in experiential terms, despite what might be said, the Lord's Supper has been almost totally eclipsed by singing 'worship songs'. As a side-bar to this point I observe the very pared down and often individualistic celebrations of Eucharist which don't even have a proper fourfold structure* related closely to the bread and the wine.

I think we should be seeking to decentre the 'worship band' visually, address the balance of content in worship and encouraging a wider variety of participation methods for congregants. 

I'm also concerned at the ethics of worship of this kind. Now that we know that serotonin releases and brain-alteration take place in band-led 'worship', we have a duty of care to congregants not to simply take them for emotional/hormonal rides and simply and isomorphically equate this with the work of the Holy Spirit, implicitly or explicitly. I'm not saying that the Spirit isn't at work or that the work of the Spirit wouldn't show up in such ways, but I am saying that more things than the Spirit can produce the feelings most associate with such worship sessions and that we are in danger of substituting well-crafted musical-emotional dynamics for encounter with God and have people addicted to this process rather than relying on the Holy Spirit.

At the level of personal anecdote, I'm constantly surprised that people whom I would expect to be able to enter into praise of God in informal, simple verbal prayer are not apparently. It seems that their ability to do this is dependent on music of a particular style and emotional strain. And I have to wonder if this isn't an indication that something has gone awry with their Christian formation and whether their 'spirit-led'ness has less to do with the Spirit than with the musical genre they worship by.

PS Stephen Garner helpfully drew our attention to this article. 
*The fourfold structure is what Jesus told us to do in remembrance: 1. Take bread and wine; 2. Bless/give thanks (by implication God is thanked for acting in favour of our salvation); 3. Break the bread; 4. share/consume the elements. Thanks to Gregory Dix for helping us to appreciate this.

Answering the Contemplative Call -a review

The subtitle of this book is "First steps on the Mystical Path". And that's about where it is pitched -so; does what it says on the tin. In the bumph I got through about it, it was also described as "Open-source mysticism. For everyone". Which is certainly intriguing to someone like me who is with the program on open-source! I think that this latter description is reaching for the sense that the book seems to be trying, in a way, to demystify mysticism. Which I like. And certainly there's been a lot of enjoyment by some of the cachet of the mystical, so it's good to 'open-source' it.

It's very easy to read this book. The chapters are a good length: not too long but long enough for some good stuff to be passed on. The style is accessible; some story, some helpful explanation. I'd be very confident in this book to put it into the hands of someone just starting to look at the Christian traditions of mystical prayer. It gives some basic perspectives in a helpful way and offers a way in to some of the most helpful writings. It also gives really helpful  explanations of some of the more enduring ideas and approaches that have shown up in the history of Christian mystical traditions. There's even some mind-blowing philosophical theology wrapped up in an accessible way. The style is sane with some gentle humour and a pastoral concern for healthy habits and proper support and self-care shines through.

So all in all, if it is possible to have open-source mysticism, this book is probably as good an introduction as we'll get.

For me one of the personal 'likes' is that the discussion about God's 'existence' (and the problems with attributing existence to God as if God were on a par with created things) helped me to make a connection with the ontological argument which I'd never really found plausible before. So not only does it give good, sensible, down-to-earth wholesome and intriguing but it's not lightweight; there's food for thought on several levels. Worth getting, worth giving to people beginning to explore prayer and spirituality more deeply.

  Answering The Contemplative Call: First Steps on the Mystical Path

Rants to Revelations: a review

I hadn't taken in when I got this for review, that it is written by a 'Unity' minister; a term I was not familiar with. The Author Ogun Holder, we discover through reading the chapters of the book, was brought up a fairly traditional conservative Christian in the Carribean and later moved to the USA and following something of a crisis of faith (though not the kind that typically goes under that label) found himself in a Unity church. As we read the book, those who haven't ever encountered 'Unity' churches or people discover that it is a New Thought movement expression, so an essentially monist philosophy with a penchant for the actualisation of thought into reality -which is a way of thinking that tends to inform Prosperity teaching, and indeed one of the chapters deals with that facet of the teaching.

However, it would be very unfair to let you think that Prosperity teaching and monism as usually understood in Christian circles characterises well the writing in this book. I have had some of my preconceptions disarmed and have come to an appreciation through Ogun's writing that many 'put downs' of this kind of thought are just too simplistic: there are people who inhabit this kind of thought-world who do so with nuance, understanding of the hard realities and pastoral grace. In addition, it seems to me that in nuancing and grappling with hard realities, Ogun shows that sometimes we come closer to one another's ways of thinking than the set-piece standard positioning might have us think.

I enjoyed the style this is written in. It's down to earth and conversational and a kind of theological reflection on aspects of life. So there's an often-witty telling of an incident and then an unpacking of what this might mean and the implications and 'theology' that might help understand it helpfully. You almost don't notice that there's some really good quality thinking going on at the back of it all! Each chapter is a different incident, so rather than being a long argument, this is a series of cameos which makes it easy to read in short chunks.

Two things were particularly interesting, for me. One was the prosperity thing and the other was the personhood of God in a monistic view. The chapter on the manifesting of ones desire which is also called in the Unity Movement 'prosperity' is written with some very interesting caveats about how we are embedded in a larger reality than just ourselves; this is no solipsist text and so there is a useful nuance about responsible and 'realistic' desire in this respect. I still felt that the really hard issue about people in regions of starvation didn't get a helping hand from the reflection, though I thought that what was said was potentially amenable to some kind of parallel reflection to that which I give in a chapter in Praying the Pattern where I note that a lot of prosperity gospellers don't really take account of the faithfulness of those in famine areas who pray for food and don't get it and they forget that the planet is only so big and that consumption at USAmerican levels would require about five Earths. I get the sense that Ogun could deal with that.

I was interested to note the philosophical way that he deals with the issue of personhood, and while still maintaining an ultimate non-personal reality (I think) he manages to deal with the immanence of the Divine in such a way as to make personhood more 'necessary' than monism usually does, although I suspect it probably still comes down to a necessary human-interface in some way. That said, I would also have to note that in Christian theology, God transcends personhood as well, so it's not a clear-blue-water division.

This is a book I wouldn't have chosen to read were it not for reviewing it: I would have shied away from the New Thought basis. However, I'm happy to have read it and to have had some preconceptions challenged and to have food for thought.

  Rants to Revelations: Unabashedly Honest Reflections on Life, Spirituality, and the Meaning of God

God's gay agenda

 This is the next wave: an Evangelical pastor who is partnered with someone of her own gender making a case as a somewhat Pentecostal Evangelical not only for acceptance of gay people in covenanted partnerships within the church and the ordained ministry of the church, but more than that: for a special purpose for gay people within God's purposes.

This book looks at the so-called 'clobber' texts and does so in a way that will commend itself to those who do theology as Evangelicals. These texts are successfully 'disposed' of in the sense that it is shown that for the most part, what they are about is either inhospitality or idolatrous religion.

it is often said that Jesus never said anything about what we call homosexuality, Sandra Turnbull challenges that. One of the 'new' things this book does is to look at the word 'eunuch' firstly in Jesus' teaching and to make the case that part of the semantic field of the term in the gospel and in the history and culture around it, is to refer to those who are constitutionally unable to make a heterosexual marriage even though they may be genitally intact -notably what we call homosexuality. This makes it considerably more plausible to see a potential affirmation by Jesus of 'gay' people, including couples and also in the early church.

I was very skeptical about this but I'm, if not convinced, at least now considering this. Sometimes I think that Sandra overstates her case and once or twice I think the argument looks a bit contradictory, but I think that the main direction of the argument is not unduly affected by those.

It will be very interesting to see Evangelicals in the Charismatic and Pentecostal traditions wrestle with this book.
God's Gay Agenda