Feeling healthy?

Why, yes, fit as a fiddle, actually. Why do you ask?

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Ears are burning

No matter how good a job we do at this site, it’s unlikely we’ll live up to the praise so generously bestowed on us by D.R. Tucker in flagship conservative publication Human Events (“Right Angle“). Daniel McCarthy and commenters discuss this site at The American Conservative (“@TAC”). Among others from whom we’ve drawn notice in recent days: science writer Ken Silber’s Quicksilber, Dyspepsia Generation, and Kleinheider @ Nashville Post, as well as many blogrollers.

P.S. And now a link from Tyler Cowen, whose superlative Marginal Revolution is on the list of three or four blogs I would take to a desert island.

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Who is scientistically inclined?

A comment below states:

I don’t think that your ranking of appropriate degrees of skepticism really has much to do with conservative politics, however. In fact, the one object of faith that is most common among those skeptical of religion is a quasi-religious faith in the metaphysical validity of modern natural science which betrays a lack of familiarity with both the history and philosophy of science….

This is a generalization. Generalizations are necessary, and often true (and often not). But I’m the type who likes to inquire as to how true the generalization is. In other words, the shape of the variance around the central tendency. If humans were universally philosophically coherent and operated from the same initial premises this would be a marginal activity, but as humans are not, and do not, there is often great variation which might surprise. This is why I explained to one reader the importance of being careful when extrapolating from your own introspection.  It is irrelevant to me if something should not be theoretically if it is empirically.

So I decided to look at the HARMGOOD variable in the GSS, which asks:

How much do you agree or disagree with each of these statements? Overall, modern science does more harm than good.

 

This is a very weak test of whether one is scientistically inclined, but I am looking for trends, and assume that the rank order would hold if one queried more stringently (there are other questions which are related to this one, but in the interests of time I’ll leave it to the reader to perform those queries).  I cross-referenced HARMGOOD with POLVIEWS (political ideology) and GOD (confidence in the existence of god).

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Religion & nihilism

Does religion encourage nihilism? & Belief in God and Nihilism.

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On the varieties of prediction

In some of the comments below I engaged in a discussion about the power of prediction, the necessity of skepticism, and so on.  In the format of a weblog the full overgrown shape of one’s thoughts can be somewhat muddled.  For example, I evinced a skepticism of predictions of the future from rational a priori assumptions, and therefore a particular prejudice toward custom & tradition.  But across the set of species of predictions obviously various degrees of skepticism are warranted.  After all, I think it would be ridiculous to be skeptical of an astrophysicist who made a prediction as to the arc of celestial orbits.  The record on these things is rather different in terms of precision & accuracy from predictions of, as a contrast, macroeconomic performance.  It stands to reason that the cudgel of skepticism should be selectively applied to different classes of rational systems and the projections thereof.  On the great chain of predictive being, I would rank it like so:

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Dangerous Places

Further to Heather’s remarks:  the London Daily Telegraph has a photo-display titled “20 of the world’s most dangerous places.”

Here are the Telegraph’s 20, with their dominant religions (according to the CIA World Factbook). I think my abbreviations are obvious, except perhaps “A” for “Animist.” There’s a wonderfully broad representation of faiths … though Taoists seem to be pretty peace-loving types, at least since the Yellow Turbans were suppressed.

 Iraq   I 
 Afghanistan   I 
 Chechnya   I 
 South Africa   C(Pr) 
 Jamaica   C(Pr) 
 Sudan   I 
 Thailand   B 
 Colombia   C(RC) 
 Haiti   C(RC) 
 Eritrea   I/C 
 D.R. Congo   C(RC) 
 Liberia   C(Pr) 
 Pakistan   I 
 Burundi   C(RC) 
 Nigeria   I/C 
 Zimbabwe   C/A 
 India   H 
 Mexico   C(RC) 
 Israel/Palestine   J/I 
 Lebanon   I/C
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Rules Of Engagement

I’d just like to put down the following marker:  Any commenter who blithely misquotes a thing I’ve said, as one commenter just did, will in future not get past the moderator barrier while I’m guarding it. (Which, unfortunately, won’t be all the time.)

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The Political Viability of Religious Conservatism

It doesn’t have much, according to Alex Knepper in this post from another blog, date about two weeks ago.  I particularly liked the Tenth Amendment point (towards the end).

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Ilana Counterblogs

Ilana Mercer counterblogs (read down a bit) to my post on “Theology Outside the Tribe.”

To her points:

Yes, indeed, Islamic theology is interesting to a lot of people, as the excellent sales of Robert
Spencer’s books
show. That is a clinical interest, though — a hostile one, in fact.  Psychiatrists are interested in insanity, but they don’t want to be insane. 

When I said that “Any given theology is of zero interest to anyone outside the tribe,” I meant of interest in the way that a real intellectual discipline — math, biology, history — is of general interest. From the fact that a person wants to study microbiology, I can deduce nothing about his tribe or fictive tribe (e.g. religion). From the fact that a person wants to make a serious, engaged, non-hostile study of Islamic theology, I can deduce with high probability that he is a Muslim.

Talmudic study “involves logic and law.” Sure it does. As I said, it is intellectually formidable, as are the other high and ancient theologies. However, my space-program analogy applies:  If you want non-stick frying pans, go develop them — the Saturn V rocket is not a necessary piece of equipment. If you want to train kids in law and logic, go train ’em. The Gods and the Afterlives aren’t necessary parts of it.

(You can make a case that they might once have been.  Perhaps you can’t, in the historical development of a culture, get to law and logic without going through theology.  I think that’s possible.  As an argument for persisting with theology, though, it falls to the midwife counter-argument.  You need a midwife to deliver a baby, but she’s no use to you thereafter, and just gets in the way.  Pay her off gratefully and send her home.)

Now, a conservative might say to that:  “Well, the religious-based teaching is our customary approach. It’s worked well for us in the past, and we can’t see why we should change it.” I’m sympathetic to that. I’ll only note that properly theological study is founded on supernatural precepts — on fantastic and miraculous things that are supposed to have happened in the remote past. That has to subtract something from a student’s appreciation of logic and natural science.

(Though from what Ilana says, the Talmud she studied seems to have had the supernatural stuff taken out, like Jefferson’s Bible. That doesn’t remove the tribal element — nobody not Jewish is going to learn logic and law in just that way — but it makes it pretty innocuous.)

Ilana quotes Paul Johnson: “The Bible is essentially a historical work from start to finish.”

If that were true, every Jewish and Christian theology course would really be a history course. Which is not the case. The Bible is a religious document, with lots of history (and some really good stories, beautiful verse and prose, and first-rate expositions of ethics.) Paul Johnson is a committed old-school RC:  see his book of apologetics. His opinions about the Bible are correspondingly colored. If you think that Christianity is all true, then of course the Bible will, for you, be as factual as an auto-repair handbook. And if not, not. 

“The central error of anti-religion crusaders is that they consider the Jewish and Christian traditions systems of ideas, denuded of historical context, to be accepted or rejected on the strength or weakness of their intrinsic logic (or lack thereof). Judaism and Christianity, however, are who we are historically (the same is true, unfortunately, of followers of Islam). One can no sooner denounce them than one can disavow history itself.”

Ilana loses me here. From the point of view I was applying — i.e. casting a critical eye on the claims of theologians to have anything useful to tell us about non-theological topics — the Jewish and Christian traditions are systems of ideas. What else are they?

“What we are historically” is a mess of stuff:  Jewish and Christian religion, Greek philosophy, Roman law, Enlightenment science, and all sorts of lesser tribal threads — the moots and parliaments of the Teutonic forests, their religion (I am at this moment listening to Das Rheingold ), Arabic numerals, and so on. No thoughtful person accepts the whole shebang uncritically. Probably I’d find Wagner more thrilling if I actually believed in Wotan and Fricka. Alas, I don’t. You can cast a wistful, even loving, eye back on the traditions of
humanity while rejecting some of them as untenable in light of later understanding.  You may even “denounce” aspects of our tradition without having “disavowed history.”

I must say, though, I think Ilana would make a splendid Rheinmaiden; and if she mocked me, I’d be just as upset as the Nibelung dude.

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Homeland security in Kentucky

Nice to know Kentucky’s state legislature has its priorities straight:

The 2006 law organizing the state Office of Homeland Security lists its initial duty as “stressing the dependence on Almighty God as being vital to the security of the Commonwealth.”

Specifically, Homeland Security is ordered to publicize God’s benevolent protection in its reports, and it must post a plaque at the entrance to the state Emergency Operations Center with an 88-word statement that begins, “The safety and security of the Commonwealth cannot be achieved apart from reliance upon Almighty God.” …

As amended, Homeland Security’s religious duties now come before all else, including its distribution of millions of dollars in federal grants and its analysis of possible threats.

The language in question was inserted into the bill by State Rep. Tom Riner, a Southern Baptist minister, and overwhelmingly approved by lawmakers two years ago. Social Services for Feral Children writes:

That must explain why Kentucky has fared so well in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. That and the utter absence of any strategic or even symbolic targets within the state….

And to the extent the agency does serve a necessary function, I wonder whether it can attract the sort of seasoned anti-terrorism talent it needs with a stated mission that sounds more appropriate for a congregation than for a cop.

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