faith in honest doubt

The Internets Have Spoken -- "Columbus"

2008-05-15T06:33:00.000-07:00

Sigh. The cat's name shall be ... Columbus. Acting in his capacity as li'l Cheney, my son cast the deciding vote to break a 9-9 tie in favor of "Columbus," giving it a one-vote plurality over over "Get off the table." The winning cat name finished three votes ahead of my favorite, "Drake." I feel like the li'l Bernie Sanders of this cat-naming Senate -- full of conviction but born to the wrong hour of history.

The one vote margin of victory should stand as a ringing validation of all the things your civics teacher -- in my case, Wayne "Four Pockets" McCarty -- told you about the importance of voting: namely, that it is fucking futile. This was the clear subtext of what he/she read to you from the teacher's edition of the textbook in a dispirited, sleepy, possibly drunken monotone, and it was right.

Still, thanks for voting.

Olbermann on Bush, Golf, Fear-Mongering, and When to Quit

2008-05-14T19:59:00.001-07:00

This was this evening's "Special Comment" by Keith Olbermann on the latest from George W. Bush -- you'll wish you couldn't believe it.

As "Special Comments" go, it starts out a little weak but gets better and better before finishing quite strong. Go Keith.

Portland's 90-Minute Springtime

2008-05-14T18:47:00.000-07:00

I hope all my fellow Puddle-Townies enjoyed today's hour and a half of Spring, that brief window inbetween this morning's chilly drizzles and tomorrow's projected daytime highs in the 90s. Ah, sweet Spring.

I spent the better part of my Spring riding home on the MAX, and truly Spring was in the air -- the silence of the nonexistent bees, the two teenage girls yelling a conversation about the disappointments of cell phone batteries, the MAX pilot's mumbly announcement that he'd be powering off the MAX train for a moment and then restarting it, the tickle of anticipation that the train would stall and leave us midway between stops, rendering us the helpless prey to coyotes emboldened by the season, the beelessness, and the smell of fear mingled with body odor. And then I fell asleep.

Spring is awesome. Cue Beethoven's Sixth Symphony, but play it fast.

The Pets We Lose

2008-05-14T12:49:00.000-07:00

Yes, it's probably fake, but what's not to love about it?

Speaking of cats, only hours remain on voting for the new kitten's name (poll at top right).

Baseball Bat Needed

2008-05-14T08:43:00.000-07:00

Another day, another set of persistent falsehoods:

Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene does not advance the theory that humans are genetically selfish. I don't have my copy of the book with me, but I question whether this idiotic meme can withstand perusal of the book's cover -- I suspect reading anything on or inside the book beyond the title and "by Richard Dawkins" would lead immediately away from this interpretation. And yet David Brooks has managed to throw this straw-man interpretation into the public again (albeit indirectly), and in the supposedly reputable pages of the New York Times to boot. Don't newspapers rather famously have editors? [Update: John at Obscene Desserts has taken a very sharp scalpel to Brooks's mess.]
Barack Obama is a Christian, not a Muslim. Repeat: Barack Obama is a Christian, not a Muslim. That "people are entitled to their opinions" is an oft-heard bit of cant, but believing that which is demonstrably false entitles one, sooner or later, to a padded room, strong medications, and little more. But let us never underestimate the perverse, willful ignorance of The American Voter! Does Obama need to literally dress the Christian pastor, "Reverend" Wright, in an albatross costume and walk around joined to him with a big necklace to demonstrate his Christian bona fides?
Hillary Clinton's victory over Barack Obama in West Virginia suggests nothing -- nothing -- about a hypothetical Clinton/McSame contest in West Virginia half a year from now. Furthermore, Hillary Clinton's victory over Barack Obama in West Virginia suggests nothing -- nothing -- about a hypothetical Obama/McSame contest in West Virginia half a year from now.

Sigh. As Robert De Niro as Al Capone ranted in The Untouchables, so I rant: "I want these falsehoods dead. I want their families dead." This blog is a baseball bat. Have I brought a knife to a gun fight, so to speak?

Austin Dacey on the Open Society

2008-05-14T07:33:00.000-07:00

Here's Austin Dacey in The Secular Conscience, defining what he means by "open society:"

In an open society, religion is private and free like this: it is none of the government's business. However, it does not follow that religious belief is private and free in the sense of being subjective or immune from scrutiny by others. Freedom from coercion does not entail freedom from reason. Text-based faiths are inherently open to the public, given the nature of language and the conversational process of forming canons of writings and interpretive rules.

It's little wonder that Sam Harris should blurb this book, as this idea of an open society and how it relates to "sacred" texts sounds identical to Harris's idea of conversational intolerance: believe what you want to believe without government interference, but be prepared to defend those beliefs against equal and equally-free people who may or may not share them. Merely saying "because my faith teaches so" or "this idea is sacred to me" should not excuse the claim from scrutiny, disagreement, rejection, ridicule, etc.

Dacey applies the same principle to the relationship between religious claims and scientific claims:

[R]eligionists can argue that their narratives are on par with scientific narratives. Or they can explain how and why they should be regarded in some nonempirical way. What they cannot do is go back to an era in which the significance of the religious narratives can remain implicit and unexplicated, an object of veneration rather than investigation.

When Dacey suggests "religionists can argue that their narratives are on par with scientific narratives," I infer an extra clause Dacey was too kind to include: "and good luck with that!"

Claims from faith are open to scrutiny in an open society. They deserve no privileged place; and nothing is served by pretending as though they do, certainly not the pursuit of truth.

Pinker on Dignity

2008-05-13T20:35:00.000-07:00

This must be from some far-right rant site, right?

Worst of all from this point of view are those more uncivilized forms of eating, like licking an ice cream cone--a catlike activity that has been made acceptable in informal America but that still offends those who know eating in public is offensive. ... Eating on the street--even when undertaken, say, because one is between appointments and has no other time to eat--displays [a] lack of self-control: It beckons enslavement to the belly. ... Lacking utensils for cutting and lifting to mouth, he will often be seen using his teeth for tearing off chewable portions, just like any animal. ... This doglike feeding, if one must engage in it, ought to be kept from public view, where, even if we feel no shame, others are compelled to witness our shameful behavior.

No, those are the written musings of Leon Kass, our so-called president's point man on bioethics, as quoted by Stephen Pinker. Pinker has written a response to the 555-page report, Human Dignity and Bioethics, recently issued by Kass and the rest of the so-called president's council on bioethics.

Kass's barely-concealed hatred of the human body comes shrouded in a concern for dignity, a wooly scare-word of a concept cribbed, as Pinker expertly shows, from the annals of Catholic dogma. Here is the most Pinker is able to say in favor of dignity:

A value on dignity in this precise sense does have an application to biomedicine, namely greater attention to the dignity of patients when it does not compromise their medical treatment. The volume contains fine discussions by Pellegrino and by Rebecca Dresser on the avoidable humiliations that today's patients are often forced to endure (like those hideous hospital smocks that are open at the back). No one could object to valuing dignity in this sense, and that's the point. When the concept of dignity is precisely specified, it becomes a mundane matter of thoughtfulness pushing against callousness and bureaucratic inertia, not a contentious moral conundrum. And, because it amounts to treating people in the way that they wish to be treated, ultimately it's just another application of the principle of autonomy.

Go read the whole thing. It's an excellent summary of what's at stake in the struggles between science and faith, reality and ideology, reasoning and gesturing toward reasoning.

(via)

The Good, The Not-So-Good

2008-05-13T14:34:00.000-07:00

As hard-working and white as we tend to be here in Oregon, polls show us favoring Obama over Clinton by a 55-35 margin.

Voting by mail is already well underway, and the votes are counted on May 20.

So that's good, right? But then there's this from Georgia:

That Conversation

2008-05-13T08:42:00.000-07:00

I wonder if we're having that conversation about race we were going to have? I don't just mean the one Barack Obama began with his March 18 speech in Philadelphia, but the one we were going to have after the end of the Civil War, or the one we were going to have in response to the Jim Crow era, or the one after Brown vs. Board of Education, or the one after the "I have a dream" speech, or the one after the 1964 Civil Rights Act, or the one after the Watts riots, or the one after the Rodney King / OJ Simpson verdicts, or the one after Hurricane Katrina. I think all these National Conversations About Race are all the same National Conversation About Race, and I wonder: are we having it?

I don't know. Here are a few readings:

Political pundits more or less freely obsess about race, but candidates seem to be held to very different standards.
West Virginia is expected to hand Hillary Clinton a big victory today. The pro-Clinton demographics seem to have a lot to do with race.
It turns out people are strongly attuned to racial differences, and pure neutrality is not so easy. (H/T)
For decades, Oregon dealt with the problem of slavery and race relations largely by keeping black people out of the territory/state. To this day, Oregon has a comparatively small African-American population. Sometimes we hear things we wish we hadn't.

Is this the conversation? You tell me.

Honor Killing and Truth-Telling

2008-05-12T17:40:00.000-07:00

A disgusting story of honor killing in Iraq has received deservedly outraged commentary from Ophelia Benson, PZ Myers, and Taner Edis, although the latter's outrage comes qualified with a rather too generous wish to find ways to spare Islam:

If we want to make a case that most of us would be better off without supernatural religion, we cannot just make lists of religious outrages. It is not even enough to point out that the outrages are directly and organically linked to particular religious views. (Remember, I think this linkage holds true with honor killings.) We need something more comprehensive, and I'm honestly not sure this is available. If we really are concerned about honor killings, maybe we should shut up about the evils perpetrated by religion and just support gentler interpretations of belief. We may even have to knowingly promote a false belief, that there is such a thing as True Islam and that it endorses our moral convictions.

What would the "gentler interpretations" indicate by way of behavior and belief? Just cracking a few ribs and blackening the eyes instead of outright killing?

No. Honor killing is an inexcusable barbarity that exemplifies the larger barbarity of Islam. We should eagerly await the day when people are embarrassed to have ever taken such barbarities seriously; we should speak clearly and unambiguously with the goal of bringing such obervances to the disrepute they deserve.

At least Edis refuses to pretend Islam has nothing to do with it; not so Tristero:

I would imagine that there are proportionally about as many Muslim fathers capable of psychotic rage who would stomp their daughter to death as there are Christian and Jewish ones - that is, not many at all. So obviously, something is seriously twisted about any community, religious or otherwise, that condones such insanity.

If there are Jewish fathers and Christian fathers gathering male relatives to stomp the lives out of daughters for the sake of their favorite gods, we should condemn them. Where are they? What is the basis for these imaginings of Tristero?

The point is not that Christianity and Judaism and 'the west' are blameless. They're not. The point is that the idiotic excuse-making needs to stop.

Bill O'Reilly Has Severe Shortcomings

2008-05-12T17:18:00.000-07:00

Yes, but so what? He's barely even worth ridiculing.

Chimps have amazing short-term memory (story).

Latest Platypus Findings

2008-05-12T10:41:00.000-07:00

Having long since reached the limits of what anal probing can tell us about animals, scientists have taken to sequencing genomes, a recent example being the platypus, Australia's flagship chimera:

Decoding the platypus genome has long been an important goal for biologists seeking to understand the origins of mammal evolution.

The study, appearing in today's edition of the journal Nature, gives scientists a new window into the genetic architecture of the earliest mammals.

"The platypus genome, like the animal itself, is an amazing amalgam of reptile-like and mammal-like features," said project co-leader Jennifer Graves, of the Australian National University in Canberra.

For those of you hoping to keep a platypus as a pet, you'll be wise to choose a female:

Male platypuses produce a pain-inducing, snake-like venom, composed of at least 19 different substances, which is delivered to enemies or rival males through spurs on the males' hind legs.

The interesting thing about platypus venom is that it plays no role in predation, but serves only to inflict pain on sexual rivals or to defend against predators.

I don't know if this is actually true* -- my hands-on research on platypuses, whether of the anal-probing or genome-sequencing variety, is zero -- but it was presented as a fact in a televised documentary I saw on the platypus, which illustrated the point by recreating an anecdote in which an Australian man made the mistake of grabbing a wild platypus. Long story short: the platypus dug in with his venemous spurs, and the man's yelp of pain was very Aussie-sounding.

He should have grabbed a female.

*Wikipedia agrees that platypus venom is not used for predation. This makes sense -- female platypuses don't have venom spurs and yet require food.

Same Strokes

2008-05-12T09:05:00.000-07:00

What is the deal with McSame's left eye? It seems curiously parked in a sort of motionless mid-wink in recent weeks. Did he recently have a stroke? He is frighteningly old, after all.

I am just asking -- he would make a bad president even if he were younger and even if he weren't concealing a recent stroke.

New Humanist Symposium

2008-05-11T18:42:00.000-07:00

Humanist Symposium #19 is up at Letters from a broad.

It includes my musings about spandrels but ever so much more from a variety of humanist bloggers.

Happy reading!

Squint Until You See Jesus

2008-05-11T17:08:00.000-07:00

Robert Louis Wilken knows how to interpret the Bible. He knows when to take it literally and when not to because he knows what it really means:

St. Ambrose wrote: “The Lord Jesus came and what was old was made new.” Everything in the Scriptures is to be related to him. As a medieval commentator put it, “All of divine scripture is one book, and that one book is Christ, because all of divine scripture speaks of Christ, and all of divine scripture is fulfilled in Christ.” ... Jesus Christ brings about the unity of Scripture, because he is the end-point and fullness of Scripture. Everything in it is related to him. In the end he is its sole object. Consequently, he is, so to speak, its whole exegesis.

That's how to read the Bible -- keep squinting your eyes until whatever you're reading addresses Jesus. If the passage you're reading doesn't address Jesus in any obvious way, take that as a cue to squint harder and re-read. You're not crazy if you don't see it at first:

The Old Testament is a large book, and it is not obvious how everything in it derives its meaning from Christ.

Squint, re-read, squint, repeat. Soon enough a Jesus-centered interpretation will pop into your head, and it will be the right one. So says theologian Robert Wilken.

This answers the question about the parts of the Bible that don't directly address Jesus -- they allegorically address Jesus. Fair enough, but what about the parts that do directly address Jesus and yet raise all kinds of questions? What is to be done with those? When Jesus got peeved and cursed a fig tree, was he setting up an allegory about himself? Did he actually curse the fig tree, or was he making some kind of larger point about himself? Or was he, perhaps, making a larger point about fig trees? About fruit trees in general? About eating fruit? What point might that have been, and how do we know when we've squinted and re-read enough to have located it?

The task of an interpreter is to help the faithful look beyond the surface, to highlight a word here, an image there, to find Christ unexpectedly, to drink at the bountiful spring whose water is ever fresh.

Maybe it's just me, but that doesn't really answer the question about the cursing of the fig tree. Or anything else. Apparently I need to do some more squinting and re-reading on that one.

No, I think I'll do something more worthwhile, like, oh, say, damnnear anything.

Something tells me that this approach to reading the books of the Bible, however confidently put forward by theologian Robert Wilken, would not be shared by Jews or Muslims. I am pretty sure they wouldn't recommend reading, say, the the book of Exodus or the book of Jonah as allegories about Jesus. I don't know what they'd say, but I'm confident it wouldn't be that. Robert Wilken would insist they're doing it wrong, and they'd counter-insist that he's the one doing it wrong.

OK, onto that damnnear anything else I mentioned ...

Snaps to All That

2008-05-11T06:41:00.000-07:00

Mike Tidwell in Orion Magazine bears witness to a snap:

Our climate system isn’t just “changing.” It’s not just “warming.” It’s snapping, violently, into a whole new regime right before our eyes. A fantastic spasm of altered weather patterns is crashing down upon our heads right now. ... A CLIMATE SNAP? REALLY? It sounds so much like standard fear-mongering and ecohyperbole. But here’s proof: One of the most prestigious scientific bodies in the world, the group that just shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore for its climate work, predicted fourteen months ago that unchecked global warming could erase all of the Arctic Ocean’s summertime ice as early as 2070. Then, just two months later, in April 2007, a separate scientific panel released data indicating that the 2070 mark was way off, suggesting that ice-free conditions could come to the Arctic as early as the summer of 2030. And as if this acceleration weren’t enough, yet another prediction emerged in December 2007. Following the year’s appalling melt season, in which vast stretches of Arctic ice the size of Florida vanished almost weekly at times, a credible new estimate from the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, indicated there could be zero—zero—summer ice in the Arctic as early as 2013.

These swings in projections underscore the complexities and uncertainties of climate science, uncertainties that the fossil fuel industries will continue to balloon into outright denialism on global warming. The disappearance of polar ice and the stubbornness of droughts are here for all to see, whatever the models say.

Meanwhile, closer to home (if your home is in the USA), mass transit ridership is climbing along with gas prices:

Mass transit systems around the country are seeing standing-room-only crowds on bus lines where seats were once easy to come by. Parking lots at many bus and light rail stations are suddenly overflowing, with commuters in some towns risking a ticket or tow by parking on nearby grassy areas and in vacant lots ... The increase in transit use coincides with other signs that American motorists are beginning to change their driving habits, including buying smaller vehicles. The Energy Department recently predicted that Americans would consume slightly less gasoline this year than last — for the first yearly decline since 1991.

Yay mass transit? Paul Krugman offers the buzzkill:

[A]s of 2005, only 4.7 percent of American workers took mass transit to work. So even a 10% surge in mass transit ridership would take only around half a percent of drivers off the road.

The point isn’t that nothing can be done — it’s just that serious reductions in driving would require a lot of long-term rearrangement of the way we live. It will come — but not quickly.

Here in the People's Republic of Portland and places like it, this isn't such a big deal: instead of sitting alone in a gigantic SUV on I-84 listening to rush hour traffic and talk radio ads, we can sit in the MAX and listen to the sales pitches for candy bars as sold out of the pockets of the shoplifters themselves. But for townies in places like Ponca City, Oklahoma and Klamath Falls, Oregon, there is no MAX, nor any other mass transit option. Only the shoplifters.

I honestly don't know how the substantial portions of the USA lacking alternative forms of transportation will adjust as gasoline prices inch past $4/gallon and ascend from there, but it is not a happy snap.

We may look back on the eight years of Clinton-Gore and the succeeding eight years of Bush-Cheney as sixteen years of abysmal frittering, and not only in the already-expected ways (obsessing over Bill Clinton's sex life, launching wars against non-threats), but as a last window of time when we didn't bother to bend on matters of energy and transportation, choosing to allow ourselves to break later. Snap.

Musical Coincidences

2008-05-10T16:10:00.000-07:00

Someone with the screen name danceswithanxiety has posted a muxtape featuring many songs I really like. Neat!

The Pope on the Birds & Bees

2008-05-10T12:31:00.000-07:00

Celibacy doesn't stop the Pope from having all kinds of insights about sex; in fact, since he can't do it, what else can he do but talk about it?

Pope Benedict XVI on Saturday acknowledged that the Vatican's teaching against birth control was difficult as he praised a 1968 Church document that condemned contraception.

Pope Benedict expressed concern that human life risks losing its value in today's culture.

In a speech marking the 40th anniversary of the document, Benedict reiterated the Church's ban against artificial birth control as well as more recent teaching against using artificial procreation methods.

Would it be gauche to suggest the ban on contraception adds to the church's child-rape problem since condoms can reduce the odds of transmitting certain diseases? I'd prefer that child rapists at least have the decency to avoid spreading diseases to their victims.

(Yes, as I read over the previous paragraph, I realize I have been gauche. I should resume pretending that child rape has nothing to do with Ratzinger or the Catholic Church. I hereby pledge not to dwell on the Catholic Church's child-rape problem for at least the three posts after this one. I might even go as high as four or five posts.)

But I see that I am hoisted by my own petard: I am a person who refuses to rape children or facilitate others' acts of child rape, and yet I presume to speak about it.

Secular Conscience

2008-05-10T11:38:00.000-07:00

In support of his new book, The Secular Conscience, Austin Dacey is the guest on the most recent Point of Inquiry podcast, and makes a very good point about John Stuart Mill's "harm principle," which Mill defines in On Liberty:

The object of this Essay is to assert one very simple principle, as entitled to govern absolutely the dealings of society with the individual in the way of compulsion and control, whether the means used be physical force in the form of legal penalties, or the moral coercion of public opinion. That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinion of others, to do so would be wise, or even right ... The only part of the conduct of anyone, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.

Dacey's clarification concerns what Mill calls "the moral coercion of public opinion," noting that Mill was careful not to argue against the idea or the practice of moral suasion: his argument is not one against taking moral stands, not a "hands off" presciption for difficult moral questions.

Indeed, one of Mill's foremost defenses of free speech and free conscience is how it clears the way for the best arguments -- including arguments on matters of great moral consequence -- to rise on their own merits, unperturbed by exertions of state or other insititutional power:

[T]he peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

Dacey wants to rescue Mill, the harm principle, and secular liberalism itself from those who prefer to flee from moral questions by demoting them to matters of private taste or religious precept. He wants to revive the idea of a god-free and public-facing conscience. I think I have a next book to read.

God's Observably Inobservable Existence

2008-05-09T15:51:00.000-07:00

Recent comments by Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, England's highest-ranking Catholic official, don't cohere very well at all. It would be charitable to impute this to the way the remarks are presented in the BBC article -- too charitable, I'm afraid. The comments in question:

God is not a "fact in the world" as though God could be treated as "one thing among other things to be empirically investigated" and affirmed or denied on the "basis of observation", said Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor.

"If Christians really believed in the mystery of God, we would realise that proper talk about God is always difficult, always tentative.

"I want to encourage people of faith to regard those without faith with deep esteem because the hidden God is active in their lives as well as in the lives of those who believe."

He begins by insisting that god's existence is not, in principle, amenable to observation; then he affirms this (I think) by declaring god a mysterious sort of entity, all talk of which-or-whom is stubbornly difficult and tentative; but then takes the red pen to these claims and pastes a very definite claim over the top of them, namely, that god is active in the lives of believers and non-believers alike.

I have no idea what it means to say god is outside observable reality and then to say that god is actively involved in observable reality. Hitherto, I have been reliably informed that A ≠ Not-A. Ophelia Benson shares my befuddlement, so I take consolation that I am not uniquely at sea on this point.

While I appreciate the Cardinal's conciliatory spirit, in substance he only begs and deepens open questions.

(via)

Myanmar Burma

2008-05-09T12:48:00.000-07:00

I realize no one asked me, but despicable military juntas don't get to rename the nation-states they're raping and expect anyone else to go along with it. Thus it's Burma unless and until those pieces of shit running Burma can back off the murderous repression and demonstrate something approaching legitimacy -- doing everything possible to facilitate disaster relief would be an excellent starting point.

Resources for helping Burma here and here.

Friday Cat Blogging: Polls Still Open

2008-05-09T09:50:00.001-07:00

There are still several days of voting to go on the naming of the new cat, even as "Columbus" becomes more and more fixed.

I plan to attach the runner-up name to the dinosaur, so every vote counts. Vote early and vote often!

Thanks, But I'll Define My Own Dreams

2008-05-09T07:44:00.000-07:00

I wish political pundits would stop referring to Obama-Clinton as a "dream ticket" for Democrats (link 1, link 2, link 3). It is not.

The theory, as advanced by Hillary Clinton herself and others, is that Obama needs Clinton to broaden the Democratic ticket's appeal to the voters who have favored Clinton in the last several state-level primaries, namely, white people with less formal education, often called "working class" voters because according to the funhouse verbal norms of America, college-educated Americans who don't live on trust funds never call themselves "workers" even when they plainly are, let alone conceive of themselves as members of a "class" other than the exalted "middle" one.

Since when did Hillary Clinton become some kind of stalwart champion of these voters? I can think of a long list of Democrats who have built political careers on the basis of populism (economic, cultural, or both), but Hillary Clinton is not one of the first few dozen I'd think to put on the list, notwithstanding her brief, situational, and embarrassing panderings to them, e.g., the Crown Royal moment, the She-Spartacus posturing on the gas tax, the homespun tales of gun-shootin' and church-attendin' (complete with dropped g's).

The fallacy here is one I've mentioned before: the failure to appreciate that electoral choices involve a choice between particular candidates. That a voter would choose Clinton over Obama indicates that and only that; it does not signal any enduring attachment to Clinton. It says nothing about how the same voter would choose in a Clinton-McSame contest or a Clinton-[anybody else] contest.

Arriving at any such conclusion requires, minimally, some understanding of the reasons the voter chose Clinton over Obama, and even that may carry no predictive value. If, for example, the voter chose Clinton because of a personal aversion to Obama, absolutely nothing follows about Clinton's chances against any non-Obama candidate.

If polling and other research indicated that Hillary Clinton fared well in the campaign for the same reasons that Obama fared well, because people are drawn to her candidacy -- because they find her policies sensible and workable, because they find her personality appealing and endearing, because they admire the tone she sets and the grace with which she handles adversity, etc. -- it would count as a strong argument for the "dream team" premise.

To put it mildly, I don't see that same kind of appeal behind the success Clinton has had in the campaign, and as for degree, the raw numbers in popular votes and delegates answer that.

Obama-Clinton is no dream ticket. Obama can do better and I expect he will.

McSame's Gallery of Crazy Pastors

2008-05-09T06:39:00.000-07:00

John McSame has a few crazy pastors in tow.

McSame has a longstanding association with dominionist wacko Pastor Rod Parsley, who believes, among other things, that destroying Islam is one of the foundational purposes of the USA.
McSame has received and accepted the endorsement of Pastor John Hagee, who believes, among other things, that god used hurricane Katrina to drown old women because he was outraged about gays. Hagee also believes the Catholic Church is "the great whore," whether or not he believes it is the world's leading institutional shielder of child-rapists.
McSame has earned and embraced the endorsement of Pat Robertson, who, two days after 9/11, agreed with Jerry Falwell that god allowed the attack -- the crushing and burning of a few thousand individuals, many of them practicing Christians -- to express a tantrum over assorted moral transgressions in the larger society (not necessarily the transgressions of the individuals crushed and burned).

McSame may or may not have sat in the pews as these bigoted beasts railed on in this fashion. No, it's worse than that: they connect their twisted theology with a definite political program, and see McSame as the presidential candidate of choice to advance that political-theological agenda, crucially on the question of judicial nominees.

More background on Pastor Rod Parsley:

Background on Pastor Hagee on Countdown with Keith Olbermann:

Here's the Daily Show's take, featuring the hilarious John Hodgman, mashed together with some more Olbermann coverage of Hagee and some of Obama's specific repudiations of his unhinged former pastor:

God, God's Words, & God's Followers

2008-05-08T20:26:00.000-07:00

There is violence and intolerance aplenty in the world's leading holy books: see here a quiz and its answers comparing the viciousness of the Old Testament, New Testament, and the Koran; here's more violence in the Koran; and still more violence in the Koran.

All well and good, but again and again, the point is made that no meaningful conclusions about a person's beliefs follow from the person's choice of holy books. Castigating Sam Harris for his most recent castigation of Islamic dogma, Tristero makes the point:

[W]hile it is certainly possible to read the texts of Islam (at least, the translated texts) as supporting a political program and the use of violence to gain power, it is not a necessary reading any more than a reading of the Hebrew Bible necessarily supports the violent suppression of objections to Israeli settlements.

And then broadens the point:

[T]here is no such thing as "Islam" but Islams - plural. To lump all Islams together and condemn the aggregate as inherently violent is not merely silly, but bizarre.

Granted, there are violent and non-violent people who self-label as devout Muslims, just as there are child-rapist-shielding and non-child-rapist-shielding people who self-label as devout Christians, and it's worthwhile to draw the distinctions.

To that end, how on earth do we draw the distinctions? I want to understand the non-literalists. Apparently a person can be a devout Muslim while blithely ignoring substantial swaths of the Koran. What is the Koran to such a person? Did god dictate it to Mohammed? If so, doesn't it have to be humbly accepted as the teaching of a much greater intelligence? If not, isn't it just another book? If it's somewhere between -- in part just another book, in part the words of god himself -- how do we know which is which? On whose authority? According to what interpretive scheme? If it's a matter of deducing the "correct" passages from their agreement with an overarching, fundamental essence of the faith -- peace, submission, love, charity, service, truth, what have you -- who decides the essence of the faith? Who defines these loaded terms? Doesn't this stance just beg the same basic questions?

I really don't get it. I have the same questions about the forms of Judaism and Christianity that manage to wish away substantial portions of god's supposed revelation.

Stripping away the platitudes and euphemisms, the forms of Abrahamic monotheism that sweep away the embarrassments and evils of the really-existing holy books amount to special pleading. They sound like mere assertions that a feeling in the gut is true, and the true stuff in the gut comes from god. This is good enough? This merits respect?

If someone has a better account of non-literalist belief in the major holy texts, please do offer it.