1. Is it permissible for God to kill people?
Many people have difficulty with God's acts in the Bible because God seems to be committing or commanding immoral acts (e.g., when God commands the Israelites to wipe out certain people-groups, including children). I think that many of these charges can be alleviated if some good justification can be given for the claim that it is morally permissible for God to kill people as he does in the Bible.
One step towards arguing for the claim that it is morally permissible for God to kill people is to argue that people do not have the right not to be killed by God. I may have the right that you not kill me, and vice versa, but perhaps there are different considerations with God. The difference is that while others don't own my body, God may own my body.
(HT: Fides Quaerens Intellectum)
2. Reihan Salam on Rickrolling and Racial Transcendence:
Rick Astley, known for his 1987 hit "Never Gonna Give You Up," has again become an object of amusement and fascination as Internet pranksters deceptively deploy links to his most celebrated song's groundbreaking music video.
Apparently there's something very, very funny about Rick Astley, judging by the endurance of "rickrolling."...The profound illogic of this video defies description. Yet one suspects there's more to it. As an exemplar of "blue-eyed soul," Astley could be condemned for appropriating a primarily black form of musical expression. But not only was he not condemned - he was embraced by music-lovers of all colors, not least the acrobatic bartender featured in the music video itself. The earnestness and lack of self-consciousness contrasts with the paralyzing cynicism of our own time. What we're seeing is the promise of a post-racial future, in which color distinctions melt away in the white heat (so to speak) of Astley's soulful vocals.
Could it be that Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" is the soundtrack for the Age of Obama?
3. Omnibus Sanctis: Vampires Are People Too:
I recently read a review of Anne Rice's new book, "The Road to Cana." But more importantly I found out that she is not going to publish another vampire story which she initially said she was willing to write.
I have to admit that I am indeed saddened. Of course I respect the consecration of her work to Christ. And I commend her on striving to follow God's will. I just wish that it included a Catholic vampire story. (But not my will...)She wants to use her writing as a tool for Evangelism. Well, there is no other genre of literature better equipped for Evangelism than the vampire story. It has only been recently that vampires have suffered from the modern preoccupation of calling what is evil, good and what is good, evil. And do not mistake something which is intrinsically evil as something intrinsically other. Vampires are us, what we become (monsters) when we turn our backs to God and give ourselves over to unbridled passions, our lusts and selfishness, our nihilism. In this way vampire stories are at their core Catholic. Built into the conventions of the genre is Catholic theology; light/darkness, blood/life, life/sacrifice, undeath/damnation, soul/immortality, instinct/vice, sin/slavery, the sacramentals (holy water, crucifixes, rosaries, etc...).
4. Kyle Smith on Errol Morris and the Smoking Gun of Abu Ghraib
Did you know the Iraqi prisoner standing on the box in the famous Abu Ghraib photo didn't really believe he was going to be electrocuted, that he laughed at his captors' silly threats, that he was only on the box 10 or 15 minutes, and that he later palled around with some of the soldiers who were later castigated for their "torture" of prisoners? Errol Morris's Abu Ghraib documentary "Standard Operating Procedure," which casts the enlisted soldiers convicted of abuse in a sympathetic light, searches for a higher power to blame for their acts-but doesn't find one.
5. Car patrol vs. foot patrol -- From Peter Moskos's Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore's Eastern District:
Car patrol eliminated the neighborhood police officer. Police were pulled off neighborhood beats to fill cars. But motorized patrol - the cornerstone of urban policing - has no effect on crime rates, victimization, or public satisfaction. Lawrence Sherman was an early critic of telephone dispatch and motorized patrol, noted, "The rise of telephone dispatch transformed both the method and purpose of patrol. Instead of watching to prevent crime, motorized police patrol became a process of merely waiting to respond to crime."
(HT: Marginal Revolution)
6. Jim Manzi relates his experiences as a "theoretical math major at MIT and a card counter":
My experience was that it was very easy to stay under the radar of casinos if you didn't feel the need to do any of that. Just play solo at the quarter tables, never spike your bet above 5:1, and play no more than one hour at casino before you move on to the next one. There are about 100 casinos in Vegas, so you can play ten hours per day every other weekend and only visit a given casino once every two or three months (for an hour each time). No pit boss will know who you are or care what you're doing because you're so far down in the noise. You can make a lot of money this way. Of course, nobody will ever know that you are taking them, and the emotional satisfaction arises from walking into this multi-billion dollar enterprise and walking out with their money because you're smarter and more disciplined than they are. In a bizarre way, you succeed through classical bourgeois virtues: self-discipline, frugality, ego control and steady work.
Once you realize all this, of course, you figure out that you can make a lot more money in that giant casino called Wall Street.
7. John Mark Reynolds on moderation, chastity, and charity:
The man who can keep a secret and refuse to turn every personal event into a blog post and the woman who will not write all she knows on an easily forwarded email are going to be precious indeed to friends and to society. The man who is no Lancelot, so interesting until commonplace, will be as nothing next to his son, the Galahad. The Galahad has nothing to fear and nothing to hide due to the mystery of his chastity and charity.
Privacy, quietness of mind, will only be possible where a man is chaste, charitable, and humble. A chaste man has learned humility through countless failures. He knows that the libertine, especially the pathetic new media rake who declines by himself using a public medium, has no privacy. There is no secret to being base. Falling down is easy to do... and in an age without secrets we now know that all sin is alike.
8. My friends at The Young Adults team at Focus on the Family recently launched "The Boundless Show," the audio companion to the already popular Boundless webzine and Boundless Line blog for singles and young adults. The first ten episodes are now available online. You can listen to the show on either iTunes (just do a search for "Boundless Show" from within iTunes) or in the podcast section of their blog.
9. Exactly how much housework does a husband create?
Having a husband creates an extra seven hours a week of housework for women, according to a University of Michigan study of a nationally representative sample of U.S. families.
For men, the picture is very different: A wife saves men from about an hour of housework a week.The findings are part of a detailed study of housework trends, based on 2005 time-diary data from the federally-funded Panel Study of Income Dynamics, conducted since 1968 at the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR).
10. Grim's Hall on social harmony and violence:
I was reading an article the other day, in the local newspaper, about an elderly Korean gentleman who has moved into town and opened a martial arts studio. He chastened the reporter who had come to interview him not to suggest that the martial arts were 'all about fighting.' "No!" he said. "The purpose is social harmony."
That is exactly right. The secret of social harmony is simple: Old men must be dangerous.Very nearly all the violence that plagues, rather than protects, society is the work of young males between the ages of fourteen and thirty. A substantial amount of the violence that protects rather than plagues society is performed by other members of the same group. The reasons for this predisposition are generally rooted in biology, which is to say that they are not going anywhere, in spite of the current fashion that suggests doping half the young with Ritalin.
The question is how to move these young men from the first group (violent and predatory) into the second (violent, but protective). This is to ask: what is the difference between a street gang and the Marine Corps, or a thug and a policeman? In every case, we see that the good youths are guided and disciplined by old men. This is half the answer to the problem.
(HT: Instapundit)
11. Jared Bridges on How to name a church
12. The Boston Globe notes that taller soldiers live longer:
Social scientists have long observed that more boys were born around the time of the two world wars than at other times, but it has not been clear why. A sociologist thinks he has an answer. A sample of records of soldiers who served in the British Army during World War I revealed that taller soldiers were more likely to survive. In a more recent sample of American men, he also found that taller men were more likely to have male children. Thus, the culling of shorter men from the population may have increased the number of boys born within a few years of the war. Why have taller men been less likely to die in combat? He doesn't know.
13. 36 Methods of Mathematical Proof (HT: The Presurfer)
14. How long does wedding bliss last? According to Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, who surveyed over 10,000 women, the answer is: 4 years.
Prof Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel laureate, said studies showed that beyond this the benefits of marriage were often outweighed by having less time to see friends and a larger household workload.
While those who stayed single were more likely to feel lonely and have less sex, they had greater freedom, more time to socialize and fewer chores, he said. Speaking at the British Psychological Society conference in Dublin yesterday, Prof Kahneman, of Princeton University, New Jersey, said: " People have very high expectations, and marriage does not necessarily live up to them."
(HT: Neatorama)
15. John Mark Reynolds on Vulgar America
At the moment certain words are in the delicate transition point when many of us (myself included) are no longer shocked when we hear vulgarities, but wish not to hear them as much as we do. Nor is it just being old that is the problem, since some young adults will always prefer gentler cadences and regret harshness. When Theodore Roosevelt could write, without a trace of irony, that it was uncommon to hear swearing amongst the officers of the Rough Riders, then it is easy to long for times with gentler vocabulary, but more manly behavior. We have too many emo-writers with rough language who look incapable of walking, let alone charging, up the San Juan hills.
16. The Masai warriors' guide to England
Six Masai warriors, who are so fierce they kill male lions with their bare hands, have been warned that surviving the perils of the African bush will be child's play compared to what they can expect on their first trip to England.
The warriors, who are leaving their remote Tanzanian village to run in the London Marathon, have been given a detailed four-page guide on how to contend with the most curmudgeonly species they may ever encounter: the English office worker."You may be surprised by the number of people that there are and they all seem to be rushing around everywhere," the guide says. Even though some may look like they have a frown on their face, they are very friendly people - many of them just work in offices, jobs they don't enjoy, and so they do not smile as much as they should."
(HT: Neatorama)
17. See a baby's face and your brain lights up, like it or not
One seventh of a second after looking at an infant's face, even if we're misanthropes who grumble about irritating rug rats and squawlers in diapers, a part of our brain called the fusiform gyrus gets busy sending feelings of reward and goodness flitting across our synapses. Can't help it, the [Wall Street Journal's] Robert Lee Hotz tells us, we're hard-wired by evolution.
18. The Brain: A Mindless Obsession? (Part I) -- Charles Barber on neuroscience and psychiatry:
Psychiatry used to be all theories, urges, and ids. Now it's all genes, receptors, and neurotransmitters.
As a result of these changes, the field, once seen as the province of woolly-headed eccentrics, has gained a new public image. Psychiatry is now seen as a solid branch of medicine, a bona fide science built on white-coated certitude. It has joined Big Science. The completion of the Human Genome Project in 2003 contributed to the growing popular belief that psychiatric disorders proceed in neat Mendelian inheritable patterns, and that psychiatrists are starting to methodically unlock these patterns' mysteries. But if anything has been gleaned from the last two decades of work in the genetics of psychiatric disorders, it is that the origins of these maladies are terribly complex. No individual gene for a psychiatric disorder has been found, and none likely will ever be. Psychiatric disorders are almost certainly the product of an infinitely complex dialogue between genes and the environment.
Nevertheless, earlier paradigms in academic psychology and psychiatry--"soft" disciplines such as old-fashioned psychoanalysis and behaviorism and psychotherapy--have been chucked aside like so many rotting vegetables. Ironically, this shift--which is terribly premature--is occurring even as psychotherapy is rapidly improving. Psychiatry used to be brainless, it's said by some in the field, and now it's mindless.
19. The Brain: A Mindless Obsession? (Part II) -- Charles Barber on what we don't know about the brain:
The brain is the most complicated object in the universe. Nobel Prize-winning psychiatrist Eric Kandel has written, "In fact, we are only beginning to understand the simplest mental functions in biological terms; we are far from having a realistic neurobiology of clinical syndromes." Neuroscientist Torsten Wiesel, another Nobelist, scoffed at the hubris of calling the 1990s "The Decade of the Brain." "We need at least a century, maybe even a millennium," he said, to comprehend the brain.
"We still don't understand how C. elegans works," Wiesel said, referring to a small worm often used by scientists to study molecular and cell biology. In my own travels in the world of neuroresearch, I have consistently found that the elite scientists are surprisingly modest about how much we know about the brain, despite the spectacular progress in recent decades. It is the midlevel scientists who are prone to making large claims.
20. 10 Ways History's Finest Kept Their Focus at Work (HT: The Presurfer)
21. Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons Fastest-Growing 'Churches' in U.S.
The two fastest-growing church bodies in the United States and Canada, according to a newly published report, are ones whose beliefs are known to conflict with traditional Christian teaching.
Jehovah's Witnesses and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, regarded by many Christians as cults, reported the largest membership increases in a year, according to the National Council of Churches' 2008 Yearbook of American & Canadian Churches.Although Jehovah's Witnesses currently rank 25th in size with over 1.06 million members, they reported a 2.25 percent increase in membership since the publication of the 2007 Yearbook. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints - also known as the Mormon church - grew 1.56 percent and is listed by the NCC as the fourth largest "church."
22. How to Survive a Zombie Apocalypse
23. People have a limited supply of willpower:
The brain has a limited capacity for self-regulation, so exerting willpower in one area often leads to backsliding in others. The good news, however, is that practice increases willpower capacity, so that in the long run, buying less now may improve our ability to achieve future goals - like losing those 10 pounds we gained when we weren't out shopping.
(HT: kottke.org)
24. Know the Daily Page Views for any Wikipedia Article
25. LOLCat of the Week
see more crazy cat pics
26. The influence of the irrelevant
Attractive women plus cool cars equal brisk sales for auto dealers as men snap up those cars, prompted - or so advertising theory goes - by the association. But is the human male really so easily swayed? Can the irrelevant image of an alluring female posing by the merchandise actually encourage a heterosexual man to purchase it?
Possibly, according to a new study by Stanford researchers.
The study showed that when heterosexual men are exposed to positive emotional stimuli - in this case, erotic photos of a man and woman - an area of the brain associated with anticipation of reward is stimulated. In the immediate aftermath of that stimulation, men are consistently more likely to take bigger financial risks than they otherwise would, said Brian Knutson, assistant professor of psychology.
27. Ten Things You Didn't Know About Facebook
28. Paul Graham on How to Disagree
If we're all going to be disagreeing more, we should be careful to do it well. What does it mean to disagree well? Most readers can tell the difference between mere name-calling and a carefully reasoned refutation, but I think it would help to put names on the intermediate stages. So here's an attempt at a disagreement hierarchy...
(HT: BHT)
29. Seven Deadly Words of Book Reviewing
Like all professions book reviewing has a lingo. Out of laziness, haste or a misguided effort to sound "literary," reviewers use some words with startling predictability. Each of these seven entries is a perfectly good word (well, maybe not eschew), but they crop up in book reviews with wearying regularity.
30. Good sexual intercourse lasts minutes, not hours, therapists say -- Satisfactory sexual intercourse for couples lasts from 3 to 13 minutes, contrary to popular fantasy about the need for hours of sexual activity, according to a survey of U.S. and Canadian sex therapists. Penn State Erie researchers Eric Corty and Jenay Guardiani conducted a survey of 50 full members of the Society for Sex Therapy and Research, which include psychologists, physicians, social workers, marriage/family therapists and nurses who have collectively seen thousands of patients over several decades.
31. The untrained eye: Confusing sexual interest with friendliness -- New research from Indiana University and Yale suggests that college-age men confuse friendly non-verbal cues with cues for sexual interest because the men have a less discerning eye than women -- but their female peers aren't far behind. In the study, appearing in the April issue of the journal Psychological Science, men who viewed images of friendly women misidentified 12 percent of the images as sexually interested. Women mistook 8.7 percent of the friendly images for sexual interest.
32. Computer Taught To Recognize Attractiveness In Women - "Beauty," goes the old saying, "is in the eye of the beholder." But does the beholder have to be human? Not necessarily, say scientists at Tel Aviv University. Amit Kagian, an M.Sc. graduate from the TAU School of Computer Sciences, has successfully "taught" a computer how to interpret attractiveness in women. But there's a more serious dimension to this issue that reaches beyond mere vanity. The discovery is a step towards developing artificial intelligence in computers. Other applications for the software could be in plastic and reconstructive surgery and computer visualization programs such as face recognition technologies.
33. Yiddish With Dick and Jane
(HT: The Presurfer)
Three Things (v. 57)
Jehovah's Witnesses and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, regarded by many Christians as cults, reported the largest membership increases in a year, according to the National Council of Churches' 2008 Yearbook of American
-----
Jehovah's Witnesses have largest turnover of recruits,have one of the highest attrition rates of all denominations.
Reports all over the news wires from TIME Magazine-""An even more extreme example of what might be called "masked churn" is the relatively tiny Jehovah's Witnesses, with a turnover rate of about two-thirds.
That means that two-thirds of the people who were raised Jehovah's Witnesses no longer are — yet the group attracts roughly the same number of converts. Notes Lugo, "No wonder they have to keep on knocking on doors."
Jehovah's Witnesses claim of increased membership is suspect.
These reports are "SELF-REPORTING" stats tallied by the Watchtower society.They wouldn't cook the books would they?
There actually are now twice as many former Jehovah's Witnesses as there are active ones with thousands leaving every month.Baptisms at assemblies is often mostly family member children who have grown up JW.
Jehovah's Witnesses are LOSING members and are on the decline.Japan has lost over 600 congregations.Witnesses are shrinking in number in many Western countries as of the last few years, as the Internet facilitates the spread of information (much of it critical of the Witnesses).
Jehovah's Witnesses members are cautioned against creating JW-related websites, largely to prevent their members from discovering the history and dirty laundry of this organization on other websites. There are literally hundreds of former members pages in many languages
--
Danny Haszard Jehovah's Witness X 33 years
http://www.freeminds.org
For your CULT files---
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SUMMARIES OF 1000 JEHOVAH'S WITNESSES LAWSUITS & COURT CASES
The following website summarizes over 500 U.S. court cases and lawsuits affecting children of Jehovah's Witness Parents, including 350 cases where the JW Parents refused to consent to life-saving blood transfusions for their dying children:
DIVORCE, BLOOD TRANSFUSIONS, AND OTHER LEGAL ISSUES AFFECTING CHILDREN OF JEHOVAH'S WITNESSES
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#12:
In WWI, the taller soldiers were almost certainly disproportionately officers from the upper classes. Upper classes = better nutrition. Perhaps the causal link that explains the correlation between height and percentage male offspring is nutrition.
#16:
IIRC, Masai warriors kill lions with spears. Still very impressive, but not quite so suicidal as bare hands.
#9 - The wife and I agree that the study's stats are irrelevant. What constitutes "clean" for most guys is so different from their wives that the real issue is not who works at it more, but who wants it more. Generally he's cool with "organized clutter" clean while she wants "Pottery Barn catalog" clean. The latter is a helluvalot more work.
Is there a difference between a "theoretical math major at MIT" and a "theoretical-math major at MIT"?
I've long wanted to regard myself as a theoretical theology student at Oxbridge.
Is there a difference between a "theoretical math major at MIT" and a "theoretical-math major at MIT"?
I've long wanted to regard myself as a theoretical theology student at Oxbridge.
It goes deeper than God owning our bodies. Having sinned against God, we have no basis on which to argue why we deserve to live, rather than begging for our lives.
The difference between humanists and Christians can be phrased quite briefly. Humanists believe that all people deserve to be treated with dignity and respect. Christians believe all people deserve to burn in hell forever.
ex-p:
I sincerely hope this is facetious. If it's not, however, I might note that the two positions are not mutually exclusive as you absurdly imply them to be.
I may have the right that you not kill me, and vice versa, but perhaps there are different considerations with God. The difference is that while others don't own my body, God may own my body.
It's an odd thing for God to do if you accept that He created man in His own image. That is the argument that Christians put forth to say that slavery, the owning of one person by another, is immoral. If God created each person with dignity in His own image, then it doesn't seem in character that He would heap such indignities upon them.
You can't have it both ways. If God is all good, then He should always display that goodness. If goodness is whatever God does, then the word has no meaning. Either goodness is a concept with real meaning that applies universally, or it isn't.
But in defense of God, there really is no evidence for the crimes that He is alleged to have committed in the Bible, such as the ethnic cleansing of Canaan. Archaeological expeditions in Israel show little if any evidence of a widespread conquest of Canaan in the period attributed to Joshua's conquest. The consensus now is that Israel emerged as a separate national identity out of the existing Canaanite ethnic population, or migrated into the area slowly from the east.
Now I'm not religious, but if I were to think about the best way to glorify and honor Him, I'd start by not blaming Him for all of the atrocities committed by men or the natural disasters generated by the physical world.
14. How long does wedding bliss last? According to Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, who surveyed over 10,000 women, the answer is: 4 years.
This study completely misses the point of marriage -- becoming one, and facing the challenges of life together. Marriage is not for self-indulgent wimps.
Gardner: ...