January Synchroblog on science and religion

You might want to check this out: I'm hoping to be able to participate myself. Two January Synchroblogs � Khanya: "1. Interfaith Synchroblog on “Religion and science”

There will be an interfaith synchroblog on the general theme of “Religion and science” on 8 January 2008."

Green fuel technologies pick up speed in 2008

I suspect that few of these will be news for regular readers. However it's a good synopsis: Green fuel technologies pick up speed in 2008 - tech - 29 December 2008 - New Scientist

Gaza: robust international oversight needed

GAZA: STOP THE BLOODSHED, TIME FOR PEACE: "Only through robust international action and oversight can the bloodshed be stopped, the Gaza crossings safely re-opened and real progress made toward a wider peace in 2009."

Israel and Palestine in the media

Now this is a challenging and thought-provoking post which shows how bias in newsreporting works (though of course it begs the obvious question about whose bias). It's here: Undercurrents Alternative News: Israel and Palestine in the media And here's a snippet to get you going: "the BBC tend to sit on the fence or lean more to the the right when reporting about Palestine. The Israeli organised media saturation campaign seems to be working. They wage a word war against anyone with an opinion about the middle east (the comments on this posting will probably be lively). Anyhow here is a compilation of how the BBC can report the Israeli attacks on Gaza in a more honest way.

BBC Reporting- 'Palestinians say Israeli F-16 bombers have launched a series of air strikes against key targets in the Gaza Strip, killing and injuring dozens of people.'
UNBIASED - The Palesting government has confirmed that Israel has used f16 bombers, funded by the USA, to launch attacks against key targets in the GAZA strip, killing over 100 and injuring 400 .

BBC reporting - 'Missiles destroyed security compounds run by the militant group Hamas in the centre of Gaza City, killing at least 120 people, Hamas officials said.'
UNBIASED - Missiles destroyed security compounds (such as police stations) in civilian areas, run by the democraticly elected government Hamas, in the centre of Gaza city, killing at least 120 people, government officials said."
Whether or not you agree with the word 'unbiased' in there, it is certainly a kind of role reversal in that it tends to grant the palestinian authority similar 'rights' in reporting that are granted to the Israeli government; and that's the eye-opener; suddenly we realise what assumptions are being routinely smuggled into the reporting.

The language of future ministry

I'm not always a big fan of Thomas Hofstadt; but I do think he has a point in his latest reflection: Post Modern Christianity: The Future of the Church and Post Modern Ministry in the 21st Century. This really resonated with me: "But we can’t understand the language of the future until we realize that the power in Virtual Reality is a metaphoric power. Whether eternal images frozen in time or living narratives moving in time, the future belongs to those who can create and communicate prophetic metaphor. ..."
In a sense that has always been true, Hofstadt's strength here is in linking it up with the metaphoric possibilities of new media and ICT. Also important is that he links up the emerging potentialities with the inherited:
"And, we commonly call Virtual Reality only 'virtual'—not really real. Of course, every art form, ritual, symbol, or metaphor is 'virtual.' And, in all of them, their hidden feelings represent something 'not there'—something beyond themselves, something not seen. Yet, like faith, they give 'substance' to their vision.5 More important, they have the power, through God’s grace, to transform us—to recreate us—even to heal us.
Why? Because they speak an incarnational language—a language that points out of the power to which it points."
I think that where I'd want to push this further is to link this insight up with the chief insights from 'Philosophy in the Flesh' (see my recommeded books in the marginal column) etc noting the embodied nature of metaphor and of the fundamentality of metaphor to language (it's more than an epiphenomenon, folks). The point being, imo, that metaphor in artistic and ritual forms is very much more powerful than worded metaphor, being more closely allied to embodied experience.

Magicology: Casting a spell on the mind

Good to see that this is being taken seriously: for several years I've been thinking that we should be paying more attention to the mindgames that come out of the work of illusionists and mentalists. So ...Magicology: Casting a spell on the mind - life - 24 December 2008 - New Scientist: "neuroscientists and magicians have been getting together to create a science that might be called 'magicology'. If successful, both sides stand to benefit. By plundering the magicians' book of tricks, researchers hope to develop powerful new tools for probing perception and cognition. And if they find any tricks they can't explain, that could lead to new knowledge about how the brain works. Similarly, magicians hope that the collaboration will lead to new magic tricks by alerting them to perceptual or cognitive weaknesses that they didn't already know about."
And briefly, this is why it works: "in neuroscience terms, misdirection relies on the fact that the brain has a very limited supply of attention. Over the past decade or so it has become clear just how scarce attention is: focusing on one thing can make you oblivious to other things that would otherwise be obvious."
Which relates to my point (well, not mine but a point I think is important to pick up when discussing language and communication) about language having necessarily to pick out particular features of our experience/world. Language is a way of communicating the things that we attend to -that is give our attention to. It's lack of being able to say everything is not a weakness; it's a necessity. It is also what enables a lot of interesting and creative things that we value.

What Vaclav Havel can tell us about liberty

I have a feeling in my bones that 2009 may become the make or break year for ID cards and the NIR. This opinion piece brings the issues out quite nicely. Henry Porter: What Vaclav Havel can tell us about liberty |Comment is free |guardian.co.uk. Here's the nub, I think: "the democratic state must be given power to act on behalf of us all but that is not the same as the state granting itself powers to know everything about us and to bully those who resist its invasive instincts. In 2004, the Courts and Tribunals Enforcement Act made it legal for the first time in 400 years for bailiffs to force entry into homes on a civil order and remove goods. Now we hear from the Justice Ministry that bailiffs may offer reasonable violence to force inside their own homes. That gives us an idea of how the government plans to enforce the �1,000 fines handed out to ID card refuseniks – ultimately by violence meted out by men who may be no better than nightclub bouncers. It is astonishing that we are going to allow this to happen."

Superior scribbler!

Last week I was nominated as a superior scribbler. It's a pass-along meme thing, but most encouraging. The rules are at the end of this post and here are the steps to accept and pass on the award.
I was awarded by Steve at Methodius. The award originates here.
It remains for me to pass it on to 5 others...
1. Steve Garner at Greenflame.
2. Mike Higton at Kai Euthus.
3. Ben Myers at Faith and Theology.
4.The team at Empire Remixed
5.Matt Stone on Glocal Christianity
Notes from underground: Superior scribbler? Who? Me?: "# Each Superior Scribbler must in turn pass The Award on to 5 most-deserving Bloggy Friends.
# Each Superior Scribbler must link to the author and the name of the blog from whom he/she has received The Award.
# Each Superior Scribbler must display The Award on his/her blog, and link to This Post, which explains The Award.
# Each Blogger who wins The Superior Scribbler Award must visit this post and add his/her name to the Mr. Linky List. That way, we'll be able to keep up-to-date on everyone who receives This Prestigious Honor!
# Each Superior Scribbler must post these rules on his/her blog."

A Walk In The Park A Day Keeps Mental Fatigue Away

Hmmm interesting: A Walk In The Park A Day Keeps Mental Fatigue Away: "The authors suggest that urban environments provide a relatively complex and often confusing pattern of stimulation, which requires effort to sort out and interpret. Natural environments, by contrast, offer a more coherent (and often more aesthetic) pattern of stimulation that, far from requiring effort, are often experienced as restful. Thus being in the context of nature is effortless, permitting us to replenish our capacity to attend and thus having a restorative effect on our mental abilities."
Of course this has important things to say about urban planning and mission.

The Language Of Intoxication

At one level this seems obvious, but it's significant that researchers are taking the linguistic dimension of socially-related research seriously. In this case recognising that in asking about attitudes and behaviour around alcohol there are a lot of terms used colloquially for being under the influence and (natuarally) they tend to differentiate into different degrees of intoxication and -significantly- usage by gender may be misleading because there is an ideological dimension (looks a bit like 'gentlemen perspire, ladies glow', to me). The Language Of Intoxication: The Term 'Drunk' Doesn't Really Cut It Any More Here's the rub: "'Their use of 'tipsy' reflected an average of four drinks over two hours, which actually meets binge-drinking criteria for women but not men,' he said. 'Therefore, women could be binge drinking while psychologically perceiving their level of intoxication as being 'tipsy' or relatively benign, as opposed to heavier levels of intoxication that would be described with less euphemistic terms, such as 'hammered' or 'wasted.' Such a perception could potentially mislead women, for example, to feel as though they are capable of driving after drinking because they are 'only tipsy.''"
My interest, is back to the 'giving names to the animals thing', again. The way that naming still goes on, the dividing of experience into significan chunks and the influence of ideology and culture on the way that naming and paradigmatic relations pan out.

People of the Screen

Interesting article. We do need to think about literacy (and me, in the process of onlining courses and course details ....). So it's worth looking at this article. Not least for things like the reminder that silent reading (probably like silent praying -or 'mental prayer') only really caught on in 10th century. It's here:The New Atlantis � People of the Screen. But I do feel the need to question this: "Reading on one’s own—not in a required sense, but doing it because you want to read—that skill has to be cultivated at an early age." I'm not sure how far reading should be reified like that. I like reading -except that I don't; in reality I like what reading delivers: facts; stories; news; social networking ... So how far do we really need to join in with the 'alas and alack'-ing about young people not reading books (and how true is that anyway?) Would we have the same trouble with listening to political speeches for an hour or more, or lectures that are monological? Not really. We adapt -though some bemoan.

We seem to have fetishised reading. It's not necessarily a good in itself; it's a medium and as such has ideological and psychological consequences (some of which were bemoaned with the advent of mass printing). Let's just recall: when we go on the internet a lot of what's involved is reading. It's part of our communicative repertoire; it doesn't have to be done in mega doses. I suspect that behind this is a moral panic devolving from 'high cultural' norms and hegemonic moves.

Now I think that the following quote is more 'on the money':

"print literacy has been one of the building blocks in the formation of the modern sense of self. By contrast, screen reading, a historically recent arrival, encourages a different kind of self-conception, one based on interaction and dependent on the feedback of others. It rewards participation and performance, not contemplation. It is, to borrow a characterization from sociologist David Riesman, a kind of literacy more comfortable for the “outer-directed” personality who takes his cues from others and constantly reinvents himself than for the “inner-directed” personality whose values are less flexible but also less susceptible to outside pressures. How does a culture of digitally literate, outer-directed personalities “read”?"

. In fact, I think I said -that is wrote (and is that an interesting an significant carry-over of a semantic field?)- something along those lines not so long ago.

As one of those 'outer directed' types, I can't help wondering 'why is this a bad thing?' -Oh that's right; because it potentially shifts power. Welcome to my world. And the answer to that rhetorcal (?) question ending the quote might well be 'collaboratively' -which is what happens anyway even among academics who are well-formed by the inner-directed praxes of academia: 'college' comes from the Latin for reading together, for example. And what about all those colloquies and symposia?

Which rather belies the anti-paeon ending with the quote "“Surrendering to the organizing logic of a book is, after all, the way one learns,”"
No it isn't.
Dialoguing with it interiorly or extoriorly, learning to relate it to our own experience, values and a prioris and so forth (look at educational research, for goodness sake) is how we learn. Just because the writer of this piece has got how to do that with books down pat and has made a relative success in a print-media world doesn't mean it's right for all and ever, and in facts acts ideologically and mythically to justify her preferred ways and to maintain others in relative powerlessness.

Yes, we should be alert to the way that the newer literacies based on newer technologies alter our sensorium and our mentalities; but we need to be wary of making simple 'old=good, new=bad' judgements such as this article, in its oh-so-reasonable way ends up doing. To be sure, it does keep wandering into engaging with counter-views, but fails to critique its own sureties (for example; the 'bad' habits of screen reading seem to apply to many readers of newspapers and magazines).

At the end of the day the kind of position that the author is setting out seems limited by the apparent inability to imagine things could be different and still well. Or to be prepared to imagine that there could be positive and good effects in different ways of handling information and of thinking (as well as difficulties in the old -which we largely don't notice because we're too used to them and no longer notice our coping mechanisms). "The old is better". But then again, new wine can be viewed positively...

Typealyzer

Given that I tend to show up in MBTI as ENTP, then this typing according to ones blog seems to be good, especially as it took only a few moments.Typealyzer: "The analysis indicates that the author of http://nouslife.blogspot.com is of the type:
INTP - The Thinkers"
I'd be interested to hear other peoples' experiences.
Htt Stephen.

Edinburgh 2010 - Mission Themes

The 1910 Edinburgh conference was a landmark event in mission history. So it's interesting and perhaps significant that there's a centennial being planned. The provisional themes have recently been announced:
"The Nine Mission Themes
1. Foundations for mission
2. Christian mission among other Faiths
3. Mission and postmodernities
4. Mission and power
5. Forms of missionary engagement
6. Theological education and formation
7. Christian communities in contemporary contexts
8. Mission and unity – ecclesiology and mission
9. Mission spirituality and authentic discipleship"
I'm wondering if I can get delegate status to go ...
A bit more detail here: Start The Week: Edinburgh 2010 - Mission Themes:

A name where there had been none

On the strenghth of this quotation from A name where there had been none | Culture Making which goes like this: "God is perfectly capable of naming every animal and giving Adam a dictionary—but he does not. He makes room for Adam’s creativity—not just waiting for Adam to give a pre-existing right answer to a quiz, but genuinely allowing Adam to be the one who speaks something out of nothing, a name where there had been none, and allowing that name to have its own being.
—Culture Making, p.109"
I moved the book from my pending file to ordered: it puts well the kind of thing I've been developing under the tag 'homo_loquens' ... and actually written some papers about. Time to dust 'em off, perhaps and head for publication if it's not too late.

Justice and the human brain

We should take note of this: Justice may be hard-wired into the human brain - life - 11 December 2008 - New Scientist and it's probably no surprise at one level: "ancient and modern criminal justice systems may otherwise be built on a much more primitive, pre-existing machinery for recognizing unfairness to you", after all we have to process the stuff to do with justice and ethics somewhere in our brains. Of course there will be the same old interpretive tussle on both sides of the God-no-god debate and this adds nothing new to that. We simply need to note that the why and the how questions still need to be looked at separately and that we shouldn't make the mistake of treating this 'how?' as if it tells us something about 'why?'

Virgin birth belief surprise

I was pleasantly surprised by this set of stats reported here: Theos think tank - News -> 1 in 3 Britons believe in virgin birth the salient point being:
"In the poll of over a thousand adults, undertaken for Theos by ComRes, 34% of people agreed that the statement 'Jesus was born to a virgin called Mary' was historically accurate. Only 32% considered it fictional. Women are more likely to believe in the virgin birth (39%) than men (29%)."
Full report here.

Oliver Postgate -respect in death

A'm really slow in marking the death of someone who was a fond part of my childhood. Interestingly, Mr Postgate had a blog (and a very interesting one too, if infrequently posted). Do have a look as a last respect. The Law of unintended consequences is an interesting dialogue between God and the Devil about current affairs, worth pondering. I'm also interested to know what will happen to such a blog once its author has died. (what would happen to mine?) Oliver Postgate - Creator of Bagpuss, The Clangers, Ivor the Engine and other Childrens TV classics

Cleanliness Makes People Less Severe In Moral Judgments

I can't help wondering about religious traditions where bathing and washing are part of the regular routine, in the light of this research: Cleanliness Makes People Less Severe In Moral Judgments. Here's the main summary statement of what was discovered: "findings from both experiments demonstrated that those who were subject to the cognitive feeling of cleanliness exercised less severe moral judgment than their counterparts"
Of course the intriguing possibility it opens up is the prospect of defence lawyers asking for jurors to have showers before deliberating ...

More research on praying

Sometimes science is not as objective as is made out. Take a look at this article, A Book Of Common Prayers and note this interpretive gloss by one of the researchers: "Prayer writers also tend to frame their prayers broadly, in abstract psychological language, and this allowed them to make many interpretations of the results of their prayers"
Which seems to indicate that prayer can be a bit like cold reading. And while you'll get no argument from me; it is clear that sometimes levels of abstraction do allow multiple interpretations. The point in intercessory praying would be to move over time towards more specific and focused understandings of the will of God.
The other misreading that seems to be tied up in this sentence is that writers of prayers are trying to produce prayers that can be seen as answered in multiple ways. As a writer and user of written prayers, I'd have to say that it's actually producing something that is at the start of the intercessory process and which therefore needs to be written at sufficient a level of abstraction to be apprehensible by people in a variety of situations. There's little point writing a prayer unless you're trying to allow a number of people in differing situations to find something in it that expresses something of their relationship with the Divine and their experience of the world. So it's not cold reading so much as a wide starting point.

Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy an anti-depressant treatment?

As someone who, in the past, has dealt with people suffering depression and wanting to maintain their relationship with God (not easy in depression) I'm interested when there seems to be something that can positively link spiritual practice and dealing with depression. Here's the report
Depression Treatment: Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy As Effective As Anti-depressant Medication, Study Suggests and here's the guts of what it says: "a group-based psychological treatment, Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), could be a viable alternative to prescription drugs for people suffering from long-term depression."
It's no miracle cure but it does seem to be statistically worthwhile: "Over the 15 months after the trial, 47% of the group following the MBCT course experienced a relapse compared with 60% of those continuing their normal treatment, including anti-depressant drugs"
By now you may be wondering just what it is that is being taught, well ...
"During the eight-week trial, groups of between eight and fifteen people met with one therapist. They learned a range of meditation exercises that they could continue to practice on their own once the course ended. Many of the exercises were based on Buddhist meditation techniques and helped the individual take time to focus on the present, rather than dwelling on past events, or planning for future tasks. The exercises worked in a different way for each person, but many reported greater acceptance of, and more control over, negative thoughts and feelings."
While it is stated that it has a strong connection with Buddhist traditions, it should be said that Christian traditions are not without techniques that achieve the same sort of ends: some contemplative ways are very much about being in the moment and it is arguable that the whole 'take no thought' thing in the gospels encourages finding ways for us to be learning to be present to the present, so to speak.
Since there is, it seems to me, a cognitive element to much depression, based in events and our interpretation of them, then learning how to bypass or downplay certain kinds of cognitive habits must surely have important effects on us. It may be that this is related to reasons why 'religious' people seem to score significantly better in health and well-being indices.
Of course we should beware of the obliquity factor here; and the danger of appropriating spiritual traditions for their obique /secondary ends. It might be better, in view of the research, to encourage people to learn mindfulness for their health and then help them to apply it as spiritual practice.

High challenge can mean more learning

An important piece of research comparing learning starting with easier problems, starting with harder problems or having them in random order. Probably our instinct would be that starting with easier problems would be the better way. However, as this article Using Challenging Concepts To Learn Promotes Understanding Of New Material tell us: "the effects of the different training methods depended on the type of categories that the participants were learning. When the categories could be easily described (i.e. was the line horizontal or vertical?), all three of the training procedures were equally effective. However, when the categories could not be described easily, starting with the harder problems then moving to easier ones produced the best results."
It would seem that the Adam naming the animals paradigm (where there is no preconceived system; you have to sort it out for yourself) is the most effective ...

Mamma Mia! My, my, how can I resist you?

Oh dear. Here was I; happily anticipating going to a Mama Mia! sing-a-long on Tuesday night, and then I read this articleMamma Mia! My, my, how can I resist you? Quite easily | Comment is free | The Observer: and my dilemma might be summed up in this quotation from it: "Mamma Mia! is not so much a film, nor, as its distributors describe it, a 'feel-good cinema event', nor even a global phenomenon the like of which has never been seen, as a key signifier of gender.". You see, dear reader; it seems that I may be almost alone of my gender in loving the film. Apparently, if I go along to the sing-a-long; I may be commiting gender treason.

Well, all I can say is 'am I bovvered?' I liked it, I like singing, I'm a child of the Abba era; this is the soundtrack of my youth; it's moving for me. That said: will I feel like the proverbial pork pie at a kosher wedding? I now have trepidations I didn't have before!

Ten technologies to save the climate

Could you name 10? I'm not sure I could have, but never fear, New Scientist to the rescue. Here are three that I reckon it'd be easy to miss from your list.

7. Second-generation biofuels
Making fuel from food crops is now almost universally regarded as a bad idea, encouraging deforestation and potentially leading to food shortages. But the next generation of biofuels made from agricultural waste shows real promise. Using new cellulose-cracking technologies, waste wood can be broken down into liquid fuel, and with US venture capitalists investing heavily in these technologies, it won't be long until this idea becomes a reality. However, with the global appetite for fuel on the increase, careful management of cellulose production will be vital.
8. Carbon capture
With the growth of renewable energy sources failing to keep up with world demand for electricity, finding an effective way of capturing and storing the carbon dioxide produced by power stations is one of the most important challenges we face. Investment in carbon-capture technologies has been slow to pick up, but governments around the world are starting to understand the importance of funding this research, and promising new technologies are already emerging.
9. Biochar
With predictions of climate change getting increasingly urgent, we desperately need cheap, simple and fast ways of reducing greenhouse emissions. One idea is to sequester carbon as biochar, a charcoal made from burning agricultural waste in the absence of air. Biochar is exceptionally stable and can be stored underground for hundreds of years without releasing its carbon into the atmosphere - and it improves the fertility of the soil.
10. Biogas stoves
Deforestation is a complex issue, and it's looking more and more likely that we will have to pay people to maintain forest lands. But until such a system is up and running, we will need to focus on technologies that reduce the need to cut down trees. One such technology is biogas stoves, powered by methane released from rotting organic waste, which would otherwise be released into the atmosphere. Leading the way is China, which is heavily promoting the use of biogas technologies.

War against Jihadism

With a hat-tip to Alan Hirsh for finding this in an article by...

George Weigel called Faith, Reason, And The War Against Jihadism: A Call To Action. ..

* Lesson one: The great human questions, including the great questions of public life, are ultimately theological
* Lesson two: To speak of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as the “three Abrahamic faiths,” the “three religions of the Book” or the “three monotheisms” obscures rather than illuminates. These familiar descriptions ought to be retired
* Lesson three: Jihadism is the enemy in the multi-front war that has been declared on us
* Lesson four: Jihadism has a complex intellectual history, the chief points of which must be grasped in order to understand the nature of the threat it poses to the west
* Lesson five: Jihadists read history and politics through the prism of distinctive theological convictions, not through the lens of western assumptions about the progress of dynamic of history
* Lesson six: It is not “Islamophobic” to note the historical connection between conquest and Muslim expansion, or between contemporary jihadism and terrorism. Truth-telling is the essential prerequisite to genuine interreligious dialogue, which can only be based on the claims of reason.
* Lesson seven: The war against jihadism is a contest for the human future that will endure for generations
* Lesson eight: Genuine realism in foreign policy takes wickedness seriously, yet avoids premature closure in it’s thinking about the possibilities of positive change in world politics
* Lesson nine: In the war against Jihadism, the political objective in the middle East and throughout the Islamic world is the evolution of responsible and responsive government, which will take different forms given different historical and cultural circumstances
* Lesson ten: in the war against global Jihadism, deterrence strategies unlikely to be effective, because it is almost impossible to deter those who are committed to their own martyrdom
* Lesson eleven: Cultural self-confidence is indispensable to victory in the long-term struggle against Jihadism
* Lesson twelve: Islamist salami tactics (also known as the salami-slice strategy, a divide and conquer process of threats and alliances used to overcome opposition) must be resisted, for small concessions in the name of a false idea of tolerance inevitably lead to further concessions, and into further erosions of liberty and security
* Lesson thirteen: We cannot, and will not, deserve victory (much less achieve it) if we continue to finance those who attack us, therefore, a program to defund jihadism by developing alternatives to petroleum based transportation fuels is a crucial component of the current struggle
* Lesson fourteen: Victory in the war against global jihadism requires a new domestic political coalition that is proof against the confusions caused by the Unhinged Left and the Unhinged Right
* Lesson fifteen: There is no escape from US leadership

At least it gets past the impossible 'war on terrorism': which will never be one this side of Kingdom Come; it's a methodology not an enemy! But let's get away from the war metaphor shall we? It's bound to cause trouble.How about 'repurposing' Jihadis? Or, how about this from left-field: doing good to those who despitefully use us (after all these ones are responding in kind to perceived despiteful use, arguably)? So While I agree with the first two (and think them insightful), I'm concerned that the war metaphor is a spoiler. There can be no victory: only reconciliation (this is true for any conflict except genocidal ones), so let's not frame it that way. If we are to win anything it is hearts and minds: any other objective is bringing down the roof on ourselves. That said, I'd go with 6, 8, 10 & 13.