Stinking Bishop

Posted on May 10, 2010 by Andrew Stuttaford

Could this become the official cheese of Secular Right?

Via the Daily Mail:

Stinking Bishop was officially voted Britain’s most pungent cheese today in the first smell championship. Britain’s Smelliest Cheese Championships were held at The Royal Bath and West Show in Shepton Mallet, Somerset. The Stinking Bishop made by Charles Martell of Martell and Son in Gloucestershire blew the judges away and was described as smelling like a rugby club changing room. The judging panel included Chris Rundle, a West country food and drink journalist, and Alec Lawless, perfumier and owner of Essentially Me natural perfumes. The professional judges were joined by a group of junior judges, children aged 10 and 11 from Wells Cathedral School, who were selected for their sensitive noses.

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Missionary Nation

Posted on May 10, 2010 by Bradlaugh

I watched the 2007 movie Freedom Writers the other day. It put into my mind the thought that the U.S.A. is, among many other things, a missionary nation.

If you don’t know the movie, here’s the synopsis from IMDb:

Hilary Swank stars in this gripping story of inner city kids raised on drive-by shootings and hard-core attitude — and the teacher who gives them the one thing they need most: a voice of there own. Dropped into the free-fire zone of a school torn by violence and racial tension, teacher Erin Gruwell battles an uncaring system in a fight to make the classroom matter in her students lives. Now, telling their own stories, and hearing the stories of others, a group of supposedly “unteachable” teens will discover the power of tolerence, reclaim their shattered lives, and change their world.

In other words it’s a Nice White Lady movie: poor benighted underclass folk lifted up and made whole by a middle-class white gal who is willing to sacrifice everything — including, in this case, her marriage — on their behalf.

I loathed the movie, of course. It was quite explicitly anti-white, the dire circumstances of the kids’ lives all the result of “oppression,” “racism,” and the rest, practiced by heartless Ice People who run everything and stomp on minorities who get out of place.  I’d imagine minorities would loathe it, too. The message is: “You’re so messed up, you’ll go on living in your hell of drugs and violence and oppression unless some Nice White Lady comes along to show you the way.” The movie seems to be targeted quite directly as some commonplace female-white-American fantasy.

I loathed it on Darwinian grounds, too. Hilary Swank will apparently be happy to remain a spinster all her life if it will serve these kids from minorities with TFR two point something (African Americans) and three point something (West Coast Hispanics). Hmmm, how will that work out?

Mrs. Bradlaugh quite liked it, though. “She’s just trying to help people …” Arguing the case with her afterwards, I got her attention with an analogy to the American missionaries in pre-Red China. (Mrs. B. is Chinese.) Same deal: bringing light and hope to the wayward heathen, at some sacrifice to oneself. (How’d that work out? And what would be the equivalent, in this analogy, of a “rice Christian” — a Chinese who signed up with the missionaries for the sake of a meal ticket?)

There’s some sort of national character trait in there somewhere. Can anyone shed light?

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From the eyes of babes

Posted on May 9, 2010 by David Hume

The cognitive psychologist Paul Bloom has a long piece in The New York Times Magazine, The Moral Life of Babies. Such research always interests me because the biological and cultural shape that humans give to morality are important parameters in setting the framework for a society which can flourish. But in regards to morality I’ve always felt that the Christian Right and secular Left often share a strangely similar world-view. Bloom alludes to the former:

A few years ago, in his book “What’s So Great About Christianity,” the social and cultural critic Dinesh D’Souza revived this argument. He conceded that evolution can explain our niceness in instances like kindness to kin, where the niceness has a clear genetic payoff, but he drew the line at “high altruism,” acts of entirely disinterested kindness. For D’Souza, “there is no Darwinian rationale” for why you would give up your seat for an old lady on a bus, an act of nice-guyness that does nothing for your genes. And what about those who donate blood to strangers or sacrifice their lives for a worthy cause? D’Souza reasoned that these stirrings of conscience are best explained not by evolution or psychology but by “the voice of God within our souls.”

In other words, without God on High humans are consigned to depravity most deep. It is in its own way an implicit endorsement of the Blank Slate model, which finds praise in the eyes of Christian conservatives when it comes to homosexuality as well. But Bloom does not mention the other proponents of a purely cultural origin for all norms and the judge of human action, the secular Left. Here it is not the voice of God within our souls, but the revolutionary vanguard, the cultural intelligensia who can tell us how properly to flourish, for their own intuitions are the judge of man.
Continue reading →

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The Demons of Bedford

Posted on May 8, 2010 by Andrew Stuttaford

The failure of Britain’s Conservative party to secure a parliamentary majority in the general election is a major disappointment. In a contest where every seat counted,  one must (I suppose) even lament the failure of Tory Philippa Stroud to win election. Philippa Stroud?

The Guardian (no friend to the Conservative party admittedly) has the details:

The Conservative candidate who founded a church that tried to “cure” gay people by driving out demons failed in her attempt to become an MP. Philippa Stroud, the high-flying Tory hopeful who was tipped to take Sutton and Cheam from the Liberal Democrat Paul Burstow, was narrowly beaten into second place in a 73% turnout. The Observer reported on Sunday that Stroud, executive director of the Conservative thinktank the Centre for Social Justice, had set up an evangelical church in Bedford where homosexuality, according to former members, was ascribed to demonic influence.

 

“Demonic influence”, who knew?

The most interesting thing, perhaps, about this strange tale is the larger story lurking beneath it: the increasing presence of American-style evangelical churches in Blighty. They are yet another symptom of the waning of the established Church of England, a church traditionally bland, benign, and not too keen on chatter about demons. It will be missed.

Rarely seen in Sutton and Cheam

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Okey Dokey

Posted on May 8, 2010 by Andrew Stuttaford

From the London Times

In normally liberal Connecticut,voters recently returned a creationist to the state school board for the first time. In Illinois, the Republican candidate for governor will be a Darwin doubter. In Christian universities in Virginia and Colorado, students study the “myth of evolution” as part of degree courses. Last month some of them took part in an annual trip to Washington to view — and debunk — fossils on display at the Museum of Natural History. Lauren Dunn, 19, from Liberty University, dismissed as arbitrary the age of 210 million years given to the Morganucodon rat. “They put that time to make up for what they don’t know…”

The Smithsonian's Morganucodon Rat

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The wives of Cain

Posted on May 7, 2010 by David Hume

Over at Discover I’ve been talking a lot about the new Neandertal admixture paper. The short of it is that it looks like most of the world’s population has admixture from Neandertals on the interval 0-5% (though some scholars, such as John Hawks, believe there are methodological reasons why this is an underestimate).

This post isn’t about science though. Rather, it’s about religion, and this weblog is a place where I can talk about that with more justification than at Discover. What does this imply for reconciliation or interpretation of ensoulment and the origin of a humanity in a religious context? Mormons believe that different sentient organisms have their own gods, so did the Neandertals have their own god? Some Catholic theologians have resolved the idea of Adam and the Fall by contending that Adam and Eve were the first human-like creatures who had souls. Did Neandertals have souls? Did Lucy have a soul?

The implications aren’t only religious. In Science there are some articles on the paper and one of them talked to scientists and ethicists about cloning a Neandertal, and one of the major bioethical issues that cropped up is that Neandertals are human, so you can’t clone them willy-nilly. Additionally, one individual noted that it would be cruel to bring a Neandertal into the world, when you don’t know how they’d fit in and function in a modern society. The same logic could of course be applied to many pure and partly Neandertal human fetuses who are brought into the world. Interesting times….

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S. E. Cupp and her future spiritual journey

Posted on May 1, 2010 by David Hume

In case you hadn’t noticed, The Daily Caller has a blogger named S. E. Cupp who is an avowed atheist and conservative. That being said, I have gone on the record and stated that she’ll probably be Roman Catholic within 10 years. Not only does she “aspire” to be religious, but, her new book defending Christianity from the liberal media makes a lot of flimsy assertions about evolutionary theory. She defends Creationism on majoritarian grounds for example, which seems more an example of opportunism than principle.

In a way I think S. E. Cupp is an example of cultural evolution. Ann Coulter’s career trajectory has taken her to a position where even conservatives don’t take her seriously. Coulter is a conservative-firebrand-as-performance-artist. There are interesting similarities between Cupp and Coulter. Both are attractive and brainy women with a penchant for right-wing punditry, raised in New England but seasoned at Cornell University. But instead of building intellectual capital, and compounding a reputation for seriousness, I suspect that Cupp is going to maximize her earning power by reinforcing conservative banalities through rhetoric rather than engaging in genuine discursive analysis. Her touch is far softer than Coulter, but she has decades ahead of her to slowly push the boundaries. To see what I’m saying about lack of challenge, I commend you to watch her being interviewed by Brian Lamb.

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Palin Inc.

Posted on April 26, 2010 by David Hume

New York Magazine has a long profile of Sarah Palin up right now. Its focus is more publicity, personality and celebrity, than politics. The profile reduces my probability that Palin will make a serious run (as opposed to a pro forma one) for the highest office in 2012.* It also leaves me impressed by how quickly and efficiently she’s leveraged her celebrity and gone from moderately upper middle class** in income (and in serious debt due to legal bills after the 2008 campaign) to wealthy. Some Republicans are apparently worried about her becoming the “face of the party,” something that crops up now and then in the media, but it doesn’t seem like they really have to worry that much unless the party has no real substance and is rooted only in style and the need to get elected. As for Sarah Palin, whatever you think of her politics or personality, she’s offering a concrete product distributed through the private sector. The article mentions that her book was a major reason that Random House generated a profit last year! Whatever criticisms one might lodge, she’s not getting rich by being a rent-seeker, as so many of our public and private sector elites have become. In fact the article points to a whole industry of liberal critique which has emerged around her, so she’s not even capturing all the wealth that she’s responsible for (spillover effects).

I have always been relatively unimpressed by the arguments of those on the Left and Right who view her as a potentially transformative figure in American politics. I have too great of a faith in the power of elites to squelch populism on the whole (this doesn’t mean that populists don’t sometimes succeed, it just means that you have to generally bet against populism all things equal). As an empirical matter it does seem like that she’s becoming the conservative equivalent to Al Gore, someone beloved within their own partisan faction, and able to maintain their celebrity and have some influence, but ultimately constrained in their reach because of their polarizing personality.

* Serious as in will she expend all her capital, fiscal and personal, during her run, or will she have to balance her desire for the highest office with having to maintain her career in case she doesn’t succeed. In other words, I don’t think she’ll go “all in” because she will want to continue and maintain her future income generation possibilities, which have a large upside.

** Though socially and culturally I think one can make the argument that the Palins span the working & middle class, their incomes were well above the national average by the time she came to prominence.

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Gray vs. Grayling

Posted on April 25, 2010 by Andrew Stuttaford

It’s worth spending some time on this devastating review by British philosopher John Gray of a new book by British philosopher A.C. Grayling. Neither man is a religious believer, but, after reading this review, it’s difficult not to think that Gray is not the greater skeptic.

This passage is key:

Reading Grayling, it is hard to resist the impression that he believes Western civilization would be much improved if it did not include the Judeo-Christian inheritance. Absurd as it is, there is nothing new in such a claim. It is one of the most venerable clichés of Enlightenment thinking, and Ideas that Matter is a compendium of such dated prejudices. When Grayling condemns religion on the grounds that “a theory that explains everything, and can be falsified by nothing, is empty,” he takes for granted that religions are primitive theories, now rendered obsolete by science. Such was the position of J. G. Frazer, the Victorian evangelist for positivism and author of the once-celebrated survey of myth, The Golden Bough (1890). In this view, religion is chiefly a product of intellectual error, and will fade away along with continuing scientific advance. But what if science were to show that religion serves needs that do not change with the growth of knowledge—the need for meaning, for example? In that case, it would not be religion and science that were at odds, but science and atheism. The upshot of scientific inquiry would be that religion is an ineradicable part of human life. Atheism—at least of the evangelical variety that Grayling promotes, which aims to convert humankind from religion—would be a supremely pointless exercise.

 

Indeed it would. At the same time, we should not overlook the irony implicit in the paradox that Gray seems to accept a little too casually. At its core “religion” is, more likely than not, based on nothing more than fantasy, but what if (as Gray plausibly suggests) that fantasy satisfies a basic need without which human society is unlikely to flourish? That awkward fact doesn’t make religion any more true, it just makes it useful. So what is a secular sort to do? The usually helpful conservative approach—“nothing”—is not really enough. A better starting point is to recognize that some religions (or variants thereof) are more helpful—and more benign—than others.

And speaking of faiths that are far from benign, Gray (not for the first time) falls into the error of seeing the monstrous twentieth century totalitarianisms as bastard descendants of the Enlightenment. In reality, they are better seen as a reversion (explicitly so in the case of the Nazis) to the irrationality that will always be a part of the human condition, the reality of which merits a more serious response than denial or, for that matter, blind faith in Progress.

In any event, read the whole thing.

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Bad News Bear

Posted on April 24, 2010 by Andrew Stuttaford

If Comedy Central ever had a reputation for being an “edgy” channel it has lost it now. The story of the channel’s decision to, uh, tinker with episode 201 of South Park ought to be well known to many who look at this blog, but some useful background can be found, courtesy of the New York Times here.

The story begins with episode 200:

On April 14 Comedy Central broadcast the 200th episode of “South Park,” a cartoon that Trey Parker and Matt Stone have produced for that channel since 1997. In honor of the occasion, Mr. Parker and Mr. Stone populated the episode with nearly all the famous people their show has lampooned in its history, including celebrities like Tom Cruise and Barbra Streisand, as well as major religious figures, like Moses, Jesus and Buddha. Cognizant that Islam forbids the depiction of its holiest prophet, Mr. Stone and Mr. Parker showed their “South Park” characters agonizing over how to bring Muhammad to their fictional Colorado town. At first the character said to be Muhammad is confined to a U-Haul trailer, and is heard speaking but is not shown. Later in the episode the character is let out of the trailer, dressed in a bear costume.

 

That triggered an ominous comment from precisely one Muslim website, and here’s what happened next:

In a new episode of “South Park” broadcast Wednesday on Comedy Central, Mr. Parker and Mr. Stone exercised a degree of self-censorship. In continuing the previous week’s story line about the Prophet Muhammad, that character was hidden underneath a “CENSORED” graphic, and an audio bleep was heard when his name was said. But in a message that appeared Thursday morning on SouthParkStudios.com, the Web site of Mr. Stone and Mr. Parker’s company, the studio said that Comedy Central had imposed further changes to the show. “After we delivered the show, and prior to broadcast, Comedy Central placed numerous additional audio bleeps throughout the episode,” the message said. It added that the network was not allowing the episode to be streamed on the Web site, where “South Park” shows generally appear after they are broadcast on Comedy Central.A spokesman for Comedy Central confirmed on Thursday that the network had added more bleeps to the episode than were in the version delivered by South Park Studios, and that it was not permitting the episode to be shown on the studio’s Web site.

 

That’s appalling. Nevertheless Comedy Central (a part of Viacom) is privately owned and it has the right not to show whatever it wants. That said, it would be interesting to know if Viacom will react in quite the same way to the now-inevitable complaints from other religious groups “offended” by the portrayal of one of their holy men in a future Comedy Central show. If it does not cave in to those complaints, it should attempt to defend the double standard – in all its humiliating detail. And if it does cave in, it will have provided yet another helpful example of just how corrosive to freedom of speech the fear of “giving offense” really is.

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