Life, death, science, and family values

Posted on February 7, 2009 by Heather Mac Donald

Italy is being wracked by a Terri Schiavo-esque political feeding-tube fight.  In 1992, Eluana Englaro, then 21-years-old, was in a serious car accident and struck comatose.  Two years later, her doctors declared her condition irreversible.  Since then, she has been on feeding tubes in a vegetative state.  Last November, Englaro’s father won a court order allowing her feeding tubes to be disconnected, but Italy’s Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, has fought to keep her on life-support.  Catholic newspapers accuse the father of wanting to kill his daughter; the Catholic Church has forcefully insisted that the government must keep Englaro alive. 

Berlusconi’s cabinet issued an emergency order on Friday outlawing the cessation of artificial feeding and hydration.  President Giorgio Napolitano has refused to sign the decree, however, claiming that the prime minister is violating the separation of powers between the executive and judicial branches by ignoring numerous court rulings supporting Mr. Englaro.  The family’s lawyer told the Corriere della Sera that the family was going forward under the judicial decree; the paper reports that Englaro’s feeding tubes were disconnected on Friday. Continue reading →

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Preacher’s lawsuit: “Religulous” made me look silly

Posted on February 7, 2009 by Walter Olson

Rev. Jeremiah Cummings of Orlando wants $50 million from Lionsgate for his unflattering portrayal on screen, saying Bill Maher and his filmmaking team did not level with him about the kind of movie they were making. However, as Matthew Heller notes, similar remorse suits over Sacha Baron Cohen’s “Borat” mostly flopped, with eight of nine thrown out before the discovery stage (cross-posted from Overlawyered).

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Faith-based financing

Posted on February 6, 2009 by Heather Mac Donald

I almost thought there must have been a typo in this Miami Herald headline–Obama thanks Crist for support of stimulus plan–since the stimulus proposal bears so uncanny a resemblance to God.  It is a projection of human needs and desires, based on the magical thinking that if it would be pleasant if something existed, it must therefore exist.  The idea that federal spending can spur consumption and investment in carefully calibrated ways—much less do so without stripping funding from entrepreneurial enterprises or crippling the country with added debt–is as much a creation of wishful thinking, devoid of empirical evidence, as the belief that we are overseen by a loving God who pays attention to our every thought and who offers us a heaven where we will live forever.

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Obama’s kind words for humanists

Posted on February 5, 2009 by Walter Olson

And at the National Prayer Breakfast, no less.

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Andy Ross’s Book

Posted on February 5, 2009 by Bradlaugh

I’m a keen reader of Andy Ross’s blog.   (And he’s a something reader of my stuff — at any rate, he re-posted, with intelligent comments, my ruminations on the “Science of Consciousness” conference last spring.) Andy’s a philosopher — he has four degrees in the subject, three from Oxford — and often writes about religion from a cognitive-science and evolutionary perspective. Andy’s a fan of some people I’m a fan of (Doug Hofstadter, Daniel Dennett), but he’s approximately 100,0000 times smarter and better-read than I am. I would love to get him and our Mr. Hume in a room together.

Now apparently Andy’s written a book. At any rate, he’s linking to a substantial manuscript with his name on it, title Godblogs: On Religion from Sam Harris to Bede Griffiths. Worth a look.

Andy’s regular blog is here.

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New Ann Coulter book

Posted on February 4, 2009 by Walter Olson

Two years ago Ann departed from what I had taken for a generally secular and modern public persona by coming out with a book entitled “Godless: The Church of Liberalism” which advanced, of all things, a down-with-Darwin line. Apparently I was not the only one a bit surprised by this development (Jillian Becker). Per Wikipedia, Godless includes the following curious statement: “Throughout this book, I often refer to Christians and Christianity because I am a Christian and I have a fairly good idea of what they believe, but the term is intended to include anyone who subscribes to the Bible of the God of Abraham, including Jews and others.” A hostile review in The New Republic is here.

Now she has a new book out entitled “Guilty: Liberal Victims and Their Assault on America”. Do any readers know whether it represents a return to earlier, better form?

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Faith and finance

Posted on February 1, 2009 by Heather Mac Donald

The argument that the current financial crisis was at least partly caused by the retreat of religion from the public square and by rising secularism will undoubtedly recur regularly over the next few years.  These are complex matters, and those propounding the godlessness thesis are far wiser and more knowledgeable than I.  I would like to offer just a few pieces of possibly countervailing evidence, with no presumption that they are correct. 

— Maybe thirty years ago, American culture could have been characterized as increasingly secular, but after the emergence of the Religious Right and the Bush Administration, I’m not so sure.  In 1978, sociologist John Murray Cuddihy noticed what he called the “’invisibilization’” of religion in America’s civic realm.  “Religious identities as such must not be pushy, elbowing themselves into contexts where they do not belong,” he wrote in No Offense: Civil Religion and Protestant Taste.  “If they do, they encounter an equivalent of the polite bureaucratic put-down, ‘You don’t belong here; I must refer you to . . . window 73B.’” 

Cuddihy’s observations remain valid within a centuries-long perspective;  even the most devoted acolyte of Jerry Falwell practices a religion that has been defanged and domesticated compared to the power-hungry, truth-monopolizing manifestations of religion throughout most of Western history. 

But compared to the 1960s and 1970s, religion today plays a far more assertive role in public life.  The Religious Right has weighed in on everything from the NEA to tax cuts.  Political religious rhetoric and influence increased during the Bush years, whether in state legislatures or in Washington.  Bush’s executive branch contained a number of publicly-professing Christians who made no secret of the role of faith in their public life.  Federal policies on embryonic stem cell research, foreign aid for contraception and abortion abroad, and other “life” issues mirrored the platform of the Religious Right.  I would not be surprised if President Bush’s evangelical speech writer Michael Gerson pushed for the greater liberalization of mortgage lending to minorities, on the ground that “compassionate conservatism” (read: his Christian beliefs) required it.  It was during this political religious reawakening that the credit markets evolved ever more arcane forms of risk-dispersion.  Continue reading →

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Save the Apostrophe!

Posted on February 1, 2009 by Bradlaugh

I have some Derbishly mean-spirited (I hope!) remarks about the cavalier use of apostrophes in my upcoming month-end diary on NRO. Had I read this story before sending in my copy, I would have been more restrained. Apparently the apostrophe is in danger.

[T]he fashionable clique of modern grammarians … has the apostrophe in its sights. Prominent among this bunch are the likes of John Wells, emeritus professor of phonetics at University College London, who argues that strict rules of spelling and grammar “hold children back,” and the linguist Kate Burridge, author of Weeds in the Garden of Words, who wants the possessive apostrophe scrapped. Prof Wells wants to replace the apostrophe with a blank space …

Conservatives should of course rally round established usage. Aux armes, citoyennes! Save the apostrophe! There must be a few big names we can enlist in support. Bill O’Reilly, perhaps, or Dinesh D’Souza, or this guy, or this gal, or someone from here …

Posted in culture | 22 Comments

No Two Alike

Posted on January 31, 2009 by Bradlaugh

Mr. Hume:  Although The Nurture Assumption made the more noise, I actually liked No Two Alike the better of JRH’s two books. It begins with a pair of identical twins joined together at the head since birth. You can’t get more alike than that: same genome, and how different could their environment have been? Yet by age 29 they were quite different people, so much so that they decided to risk separation surgery so each could pursue her own goals. Alas, they died in the OR.

That’s just the starting point for an exploration of how we get to be what we are, informed by a very wide knowledge of the child-development and personality literature. A lot of what we are is genes, of course; but what’s the rest? That’s her topic, and she makes a very fascinating story out of it.

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Judith Rich Harris & nurture & nature

Posted on January 31, 2009 by David Hume

Since Bradlaugh & Heather have mentioned Judith Rich Harris, I would recommend both of her books, The Nurture Assumption & No Two Alike to any reader who wishes be introduced to behavior genetics.   You can also check out my interview of Harris from a few years back. For the more politically inclined, a summary of a discussion in The Corner about Ms. Harris’ ideas.

The core of Judith Rich Harris’ reason for offering her thesis is simple; for decades behavioral geneticists have found that on a wide range of traits human population level variation is predicted by the following components:

50% genetic variation
10% shared environment variation
40% other environment variation

Continue reading →

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