Start building new temples

The US military confirmed the image of a triangular, pyramidal, Doritos-like, shape as one of the UFOs that was photographed by a navy pilot.

Despite all our interest in UFOs and aliens, the military is trying its best to stall the report that it has been asked by Congress to prepare and present to the public.

The Senate Intelligence Committee has asked the director of national intelligence to work with the Defense Department to provide a public accounting by June 25 on unexplained sightings of advanced aircraft and drones that have been reported by military personnel or captured by radar, satellites and other surveillance systems.

The request came after revelations in 2017 that the Pentagon was researching a series of unexplained intrusions into military airspace, including high-performance vehicles captured on video stalking Navy ships.

The truth is out there, as Mulder always told us ;)

I, for one, am not really looking forward to an alien encounter because history overflows with groups totally wiped out of existence, or nearly eliminated, by alien population.

But, curious I am about aliens.  I am way more interested in what any evidence of aliens might do to religions.  The grand faiths that tell their followers about how all these on earth came to be, and what happens after the faithful die, will suddenly have to account for an unexpected plot twist that we on earth are not alone in the universe nor are we special.

As Carl Sagan has pointed out in (the now out-of-print book) The Cosmic Question, “space exploration leads directly to religious and philosophical questions”. We would need to consider whether our faiths could accommodate these new beings – or if it should shake our beliefs to the core.

What happens to the faiths that are built on a narrative of Adam and Eve and their original sin?  The children of Abraham will have to deal with Alf and Mork!

The old Hindu faith in all its variations--the local, the Vedic, and the offshoots like Buddhism--will easily work with the evidence that there is life out there.  

The Vedic philosophy discusses multiple lokas and the mahavakya says तत् त्वम् असि (You are that.)  The alien life and you are all manifestations of the same Brahma.   A framework that is not built around the divinity of a person, but instead uses concepts like reincarnation or a gazillion gods, will point to aliens as our relations.  A different incarnation.

So, get ready for a few Paralokaswamy temples!

But, at the end of it all, we will never know how all these came to be.  I will quote, again, from the Rig Veda:

Who really knows?
Who will here proclaim it?
Whence was it produced?
Whence is this creation?
The gods came afterwards, with the creation of this universe.
Who then knows whence it has arisen?

Whence this creation has arisen
- perhaps it formed itself, or perhaps it did not -
the One who looks down on it,
in the highest heaven, only He knows
or perhaps even He does not know.

Mind your Ps and Qs ... because ...

During discussions in the classroom, which now seems like something that happened in my previous life and to which we might not return for a few more months, I would often follow up with a student's point with "because ..."

I want students to explain why X leads to Y, and not just assume that X is there or that Y will happen.  After all, the courses that I teach are not faith-based.  Sometimes, I would even tell them that very point--we do not simply believe but provide logical explanations.

If the context is climate change, then I even quote Katherine Hayhoe, who said it well that she does not believe in climate change, because climate change is not about belief, not about faith, but is about cause-effect.

Even though I walk around with a Rodney Dangerfield-like punchline, I know well that there are students who listen to me and think about what we discussed.   Like how a student wrote to me well after a term ended:

Hello Dr. K,
When we were in class last term talking about Climate Change you had mentioned Dr. Hayhoe and the quote she had about belief ...
I was wondering if you could please either send a link to her quote or just the quote itself.

If only a significant number of Americans behaved like that student!

Instead, there is a widespread denial of science that runs deep.  "[So many] of the same people who reject the scientific evidence of anthropogenic climate change also question the evidence related to COVID-19."

Given how common it is, it is remarkable that philosophers have failed to give it a formal name. But I think we can view it as a variety of what sociologists call implicatory denial. I interpret implicatory denial as taking this form: If P, then Q. But I don't like Q! Therefore, P must be wrong. This is the logic (or illogic) that underlies most science rejection.

It is not that this crowd is completely against science.  They cheer, for instance, when the American military pinpoints a location and bombs the shit out of an area full of brown people.  They know well that it was science that helped create the bombs and the precision technology to target an area.  So, to call them science-deniers is perhaps incorrect.  They are against science only when they run into "If P, then Q. But I don't like Q! Therefore, P must be wrong."

I like this framework to understand those who oppose climate change, evolution, ...

But, to reject Q just because it is not what we prefer as an interpretation means that it is only a matter of time before we run into reality.  "When we reject evidence because we do not like what it implies, we put ourselves at risk."

The U.S. could have acted more quickly to contain COVID-19. If we had, we would have saved both lives and jobs. But facts have an inconvenient habit of getting in the way of our desires. Sooner or later, denial crashes on the rocks of reality. The only question is whether it crashes before or after we get out of the way.

We are paying for the inaction due to denial all through February.  I cannot wait for President Joe Biden to throw out the regime of "alternative facts" and get us on to a path of ""If P, then Q" and take care of the Ps and Qs.

We cannot go on thinking of ourselves, but only together can we do this

I was working in Calcutta when Pope John Paul II came to town, during his whirlwind tour of the Subcontinent in February 1986.

Of course, I too went to see him and his Popemobile.  He was an important figure for me in two ways: For one, I was coming out of my pinkie years, and I had tremendous respect for the work that he had done in ending communism in Poland and across Europe.  And, as one who was rapidly drifting away from faith, I wanted to understand the role of religion in life.

It is not merely COVID-19 that makes me think about faith and the existential crisis--these have been topics that I often blog about.  Especially during high holy days of (m)any religion.

As I noted in this post in March 2016, during the Holy Week, I use the religious calendar "to think about what it means to be human and what it means to lead a good life.  Atheist I am, but I feel constantly driven, sometimes a tad too intensely, to understand these."

We are now a week away from Good Friday.  A couple of days ago, Pope Francis gave "his extraordinary blessing "urbi et orbi" (to the city and the world) in an empty St. Peter's Square at the Vatican."

Source

In that address, Pope Francis said:

We have realized that we are on the same boat, all of us fragile and disoriented, but at the same time important and needed, all of us called to row together, each of us in need of comforting the other. On this boat… are all of us.

I was immediately reminded of MLK's "we may have come on different ships, but we're all in the same boat now."

The Pope reminds us that "we cannot go on thinking of ourselves, but only together can we do this.":

The storm exposes our vulnerability and uncovers those false and superfluous certainties around which we have constructed our daily schedules, our projects, our habits and priorities. It shows us how we have allowed to become dull and feeble the very things that nourish, sustain and strengthen our lives and our communities. The tempest lays bare all our prepackaged ideas and forgetfulness of what nourishes our people’s souls; all those attempts that anesthetize us with ways of thinking and acting that supposedly “save” us, but instead prove incapable of putting us in touch with our roots and keeping alive the memory of those who have gone before us. We deprive ourselves of the antibodies we need to confront adversity.
In this storm, the façade of those stereotypes with which we camouflaged our egos, always worrying about our image, has fallen away, uncovering once more that (blessed) common belonging, of which we cannot be deprived: our belonging as brothers and sisters.

We're all in the same boat that has sprung a leak.  I hope that COVID-19 will teach the 63 million Americans that we are all in this together, irrespective of our skin tones, our religions, and any other superficiality that demagogues love to use to divide people up.

Here's to a better tomorrow!

(Embedding this song here because of the news that Bill Withers has died.)

Natural lies

I often comment that I read random stuff that interests me.  I do. And they do interest me. A lot.

There is one thing that I do with this randomness that makes it all worthwhile.  I connect that randomness to other randomness and make meaning out of it all.  I mean, isn't that what life itself is about?  We make meaning out of randomness. (A reminder that I do not believe in the meaning of life that the religious subscribe to.)

The randomness is about things mundane and profound.  We forget that there is a lot to be learnt from the mundane too.  After all, even the everyday absurd life is mostly about the mundane, right?

Consider this:

Strawberries and raspberries aren't really berries in the botanical sense.

It is mundane. But, does it not upend our understanding of berries?

Sometimes, in life too, it is a simple revelation, a truth, that compels us to rethink our estimate of people, history, whatever.  The mundane is never really about the mundane itself.

More about this berry berry interesting aspect of berries:

[Berries] are derived from a single flower with more than one ovary, making them an aggregate fruit. True berries are simple fruits stemming from one flower with one ovary and typically have several seeds. Tomatoes fall into this group, as do pomegranates, kiwis and—believe it or not—bananas. (Their seeds are so tiny it's easy to forget they're there.)

At this point, if you are like me who is botanically challenged, we are left dazed that "bananas are berries and raspberries aren't."

If you wonder how I end up reading such random stuff ...

I ran into a parenthetical sentence in this essay on natural foods: (Yes, technically bananas are berries.)

I stopped right there, stunned that bananas are berries.  How could one not be stunned with that revelation!  Scientifically speaking, even tomatoes and cucumbers are berries.  Up is down, and right is left ;)

Making meaning out of randomness is hard work.  It is far easier to believe in a narrative and never question even a random event or idea that is inconsistent with our favored narrative. But, such an approach has never appealed to me.  I hope it never will.

The ejaculating erect penises of Bhutan

If the time before the internet were the dark ages, then my formative years in a small industrial town were pre-history because back then we did not even have television.  Heck, we did not even have a refrigerator!

The printed materials, and the few minutes of VOA and BBC provided me a little bit of an idea of the vast world outside the small town.  At home, we subscribed to what I thought then to the best newspaper ever, and to two awesome Tamil magazines.  Father belonged to a magazine club at work,through which we got to read a few leading English-language Indian magazines of those days.  I had enough for critical thinking.

One day, father brought home from his magazine club the tabloid Blitz.  In that there was an article about the Shiva Lingam being a phallic symbol.  A phallic symbol!  It was shocking. And intriguing.

With age, and from a more informed position, I am now the least concerned about whether or not the lingam represents the phallus.  That is immaterial to me.  whatever!  

But, yes, across many cultures, people practically revered the phallus.  Perhaps primarily led by a belief that the meat juice was all that was needed to create a baby.  The periods that women had every month made them "unclean" and inferior, and there was no real understanding of the role that the bloody periods play in creating a baby.  So, of course, the female phallus was beyond the unknown!

Despite the intellectual understanding that I have gained over the years,  I was mildly amused and plenty informed by this NY Times piece on phallus art in Bhutan:

For centuries, Bhutan has celebrated the phallus.
They are painted on homes, or carved in wood, installed above doorways and under eaves to ward off evil, including one of its most insidious human forms, gossip. They are worn on necklaces, installed in granaries and in fields as a kind of scarecrow.

Worn as necklaces, you wonder, right?  Wonder no more:

Caption at the source:
Phallus symbols are worn as necklaces, used as scarecrows and donned by masked jesters in religious festivals.

Unless you are the current president of the United States, you would certainly trust the NY Times, right?

Anyway, back to that NY Times piece:

“Stories of Bhutan’s engagement with the phallus shed light on traditions and lifestyle that make Bhutan one of the happiest places on earth,” Karma Choden wrote in the 2014 book “Phallus: Crazy Wisdom from Bhutan,” which was published here and claims to be the first scholarly effort to document the ubiquity of the phallus.

"The tradition has been widely traced to one lama, Drukpa Kunley, who spread the tenets of Buddhism through Bhutan in the 15th and 16th centuries."

So, "To this day, hopeful couples traverse Bhutan to partake of the monastery’s fertility blessing."

But, it is not only at the monastery:

House after house is painted with phalluses. While highly stylized, they are in some cases graphically detailed: always erect, often ejaculating. One appears with the country’s name, a marketing ploy by the owner of one of the proliferating souvenir shops. The displays in some — rows of colorful wooden carvings — would not seem out of place in a sex shop.

Erect penises. Ejaculating.  On the exterior walls of houses.

Lotay Tshering, a 51-year-old rice farmer, owns a house in Sopsokha that is adorned with two giant penis murals. His wife’s uncle painted them in homage to the Divine Madman, “who has blessed this place,” as he put it. He and his wife have six children.

We construct our own narratives, and believe in them.  We draw artful ejaculating penises on the walls.  We worship shiva lingams.  And there are a gazillion other irrational ways in which we humans make sense of the chaos that this universe is to us.  If only we spent more time sincerely attempting to understand the human condition; instead, being humans, we choose one set of narratives and laugh at other narratives!

Caption at the source:
A family inside the courtyard of a traditional Bhutanese house decorated with elaborate paintings of mythical animals and a phallus.

Wandering with questions, and not caring for the answer

As a graduate student, I was in heaven in the libraries.  I had never seen so many books, magazines, and newspapers in my life in the old country.  And now I had a much bigger problem than ever before: How to decide what to read and what to skip?

I suspect that this situation was the proverbial necessity for which I had to invent a whole new way of reading and understanding.  I had to figure out what was the most important message that I had to quickly scan for and know.  I am not sure if what I have since developed is the best approach to acquiring knowledge and wisdom, but it seems to work good enough for me.

So, I would wander by the book-stacks and smell those papers and pick up something to read.  I always scanned the new arrivals.  And, of course, the journals and the magazines.  Somehow, I never developed the instinct to want to write.  I merely wanted to read, and I enjoyed it.

Those were the bad old days before the web.  Now, more than two decades into the world of web, I have access to even more books, magazines, and newspapers than I could have ever dreamed about.  I continue with my habit of wandering through the cyberspace and hoovering up whatever interests me.

Which is how I ended up at this essay in which a neurologist writes about consciousness:

Over my career, I’ve gathered a neurologist’s working knowledge of the physiology of sensations. I realize neuroscientists have identified neural correlates for emotional responses. Yet I remain ignorant of what sensations and responses are at the level of experience. I know the brain creates a sense of self, but that tells me little about the nature of the sensation of “I-ness.” If the self is a brain-generated construct, I’m still left wondering who or what is experiencing the illusion of being me. Similarly, if the feeling of agency is an illusion, as some philosophers of mind insist, that doesn’t help me understand the essence of my experience of willfully typing this sentence.
Slowly, and with much resistance, it’s dawned on me that the pursuit of the nature of consciousness, no matter how cleverly couched in scientific language, is more like metaphysics and theology. It is driven by the same urges that made us dream up gods and demons, souls and afterlife. The human urge to understand ourselves is eternal, and how we frame our musings always depends upon prevailing cultural mythology. In a scientific era, we should expect philosophical and theological ruminations to be couched in the language of physical processes. We argue by inference and analogy, dragging explanations from other areas of science such as quantum physics, complexity, information theory, and math into a subjective domain. Theories of consciousness are how we wish to see ourselves in the world, and how we wish the world might be.

We continue to struggle with those questions that our ancestors struggled with: How did this all come about? Who am I? How do I know all this is for real and not an illusion? What happens after this "I" that I recognize dies?

Science does not have an answer.  We might want to add "yet" to that previous sentence, but, come on, we won't have a definitive answer for a long, long, long time.  Which means, " in the absence of scientific evidence, all opinions about the mind are in the realm of belief and religion."

What amazes me is that the essay does not even casually mention the Hindu philosophical idea of maya.  Yet, the very idea of maya is explored in the following paragraph in that essay:

According to Daniel Dennett, professor of philosophy at Tufts University and author of Consciousness Explained and many other books on science and philosophy, consciousness is nothing more than a “user-illusion” arising out of underlying brain mechanisms. He argues that believing consciousness plays a major role in our thoughts and actions is the biological equivalent of being duped into believing that the icons of a smartphone app are doing the work of the underlying computer programs represented by the icons. He feels no need to postulate any additional physical component to explain the intrinsic qualities of our subjective experience.

Illusions. Maya.

For his part, Dennett is an outspoken atheist and fervent critic of the excesses of religion. “I have absolutely no doubt that secular and scientific vision is right and deserves to be endorsed by everybody, and as we have seen over the last few thousand years, superstitious and religious doctrines will just have to give way.” As the basic premise of atheism is to deny that for which there is no objective evidence, he is forced to avoid directly considering the nature of purely subjective phenomena. Instead he settles on describing the contents of consciousness as illusions, resulting in the circularity of using the definition of mental states (illusions) to describe the general nature of these states.

If we want to understand, and argue about, climate change, well, science and the scientific method is what I will go with.  If we want to understand, and argue about, income inequality, I will lay out my preferred values and, therefore, my version of the social contract.  But, when we want to understand those eternal questions, hey, it turns out that your story is as good--or bad--as mine.

I will continue to wander the virtual book-stacks and contemplate on that big question: Who am I?  I know well that I will never find the answer.  But, the fun is in thinking through the question; it is not really about the answer.

Source

What is truth?

A few years ago, a friend--I suspect that he voted for donald t. rump--challenged me with: "You have read about the world's major religions.  You are a learned man. Tell me whether anybody other than Jesus has ever come back from being dead?"

I usually never take up such questions to debate.  Because, there is no way that one can debate such questions that are not based on evidence.  They are driven by faith.  I merely thanked him for the certification that I was a learned man, and then moved on to other topics.

As a kid, I was raised with stories of people doing extraordinary things.  I believed them.  It took a while to figure out that belief and faith do not invite inquiry.  As my grandmother often replied, "because it is so!"  I remember once my father narrating the story of a Hindu holy man who was reportedly seen in three different places at the same time.  My immediate thought was, "how did they confirm that?"  After all, this was even before the age of telephones--they could not have been on a three-way call and reporting the sighting.  But, I didn't dare to ask my father that, the same way I chose not to respond to the question related to the resurrection of Jesus.

All of us--except trump, and his minions who might be a huge subset of the 63 million who voted for him--seek the truth in anything we want to understand.

The faithful claim about Jesus or other divine people and happenings are extraordinary claims.

The principle of proportionality demands extraordinary evidence for extraordinary claims. Of the approximately 100 billion people who have lived before us, all have died and none have returned, so the claim that one (or more) of them rose from the dead is about as extraordinary as one will ever find. Is the evidence commensurate with the conviction? 

The extraordinary evidence is not there.  "In science, we need external validation." There is no other way.  One might choose to believe in whatever, but that belief by itself does not make it an universal truth.

How do we know that the scientific method works?  Is science itself a "faith" as much as the resurrection of Jesus is a faith?

Nope.  The fact that you are reading this is evidence that science and the scientific method are no "beliefs" or "faiths."  Here is Richard Dawkins explaining that:

Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return

A few years ago, in an academic exchange, somebody remarked that the line in the burial scenes in movies--ashes to ashes, and dust to dust--is not literally there in the bible, but is a paraphrase of the idea.  I tell ya, academics are very particular about the words used.  I remember two colleagues arguing about the meaning of the word "intrinsic."  Whatever floats one's boat, right?

Anyway, about the burial scenes in movies.  A few days ago, my father was recalling old stories and about a death in the extended family.  He said only a couple of people went to the burial ground.  I suppose I forgot I was talking with my father, and as if I was in a classroom I asked him, "when it is cremation that is done, why the usage of 'burial ground'"?  He thinks it might have been from the British days, which is how English words became a part of the vocabulary.  Because the Christian British referred to the burial ground, well, even cremation grounds became "burial grounds."  Methinks I should stop asking questions! ;)

The atheist that I am, even if it were not for my Hindu upbringing, I favor cremation.  After all, death renders the person as nothing but "the body."  When alive, I am sriram, but after I die, the question will not be "what are you going to do with sriram?"  Nope.  The question will be "what about the body?"

As Neil deGrasse Tyson wonderfully put it in this talk, our body is nothing but cosmic dust.  The periodic table elements in us matches the elements in the universe.  The universe is within us, and we are the universe.  It is one heck of a spiritual way to appreciate our place in this universe.  So, after death, cremating and converting me to ashes sounds logical.  Return me to dust.

Of course, to many believers, in the Judeo-Christian faith, cremation is not, ahem, kosher.  Which means that new doctrinal interpretations have to be developed by those who can read the mind of god.  The Roman Catholic institution is now caught up in the, ahem, dust:

On Tuesday, the Vatican responded to what it called an “unstoppable increase” in cremation and set down new guidelines barring the scattering of ashes “in the air, on land, at sea or in some other way.”

When new guidelines are issued, I would think that those we quickly refer to as fundamentalists go berserk.  Either something was the instruction from god, or it was not.  So, what happens to the old instruction that the dead body should not be cremated because of the belief "in the resurrection of the body"?  Not my hassle--it is for the believers to sort out the new software update, so to speak.

Burial prevents the forgetting of the loved one, as well as “unfitting or superstitious practices,” the document states.
For that reason, the Vatican said that cremation urns should not be kept at home, save for “grave and exceptional cases dependent on cultural conditions of a localized nature.”

My conversations with my father are evidence that cremation does not mean we have forgotten the people who went before us.  We share plenty of stories about those whose bodies were cremated; a marker in the graveyard  is not needed by any means to remember and respect the dead.

But then, maybe I am being a cantankerous academic ;)

God hates menstruating women?

This recent post was about the pathological relationship that some have with women, and most of that pathology having to deal with religion.  Another post from three weeks ago was on a public policy issue relating to women--taxing tampons.  Put them together as a Venn diagram of sorts and you can see the possibility of religious institutions having practices that restrict menstruating women, right?

I have been trying to understand this issue for a long time.  It is a strange world that I had to understand as a young boy when my mother could not attend a wedding in the family.  She traveled with us all the way and then had to exclude herself from mixing with people.  It was the introduction to women's issues that were never talked about but were always there.  If not for the biology class that described the ovary, Fallopian tubes, and the uterus, and why bleeding happens, the whole thing would have been a bloody mystery to me.  (Yes, the horrible pun intended; hehehe!)  It is darn stupid to exclude girls and women from regular life just because they menstruate.

Now consider a temple setting.  A Hindu temple, like any place of religious worship, is not a place for reason.  It is about faith, and like all religious faiths, well, it is irrational.  In such a faith context, bleeding women are typically not allowed to go anywhere near the pooja (worship) room at homes and, of course, the temples too.

I have no quarrels over how people want to practice their faiths.  It is up to the believers to think about how awful their faith-based everyday life can be, like with banning menstruating believing women from the zone.

So, if some of the faithful think it is not kosher to ban the menstruating women from temples, what options do they have to correct the injustice as they perceive it?

In India, that's what apparently led a few to approach the court--in the context of the Sabarimala temple ban on females between 10 and 50 years of age.  Why the court, you might wonder.  Because,  unlike here in the US, India's temples have government oversight.

The ban was enforced under Rule 3 (b) of the Kerala Hindu Places of Public Worship (Authorisation of Entry) Rules, 1965 (women at such time during which they are not by custom and usage allowed to enter a place of public worship).

So, if the government oversees the functioning of temples, then, of course, the judicial arm of the government has a say in whether menstruating women should be barred from entering temples.

A Special Bench led by Justice Dipak Misra, which is hearing the Sabarimala temple entry issue, will consider the intervention application. The students want the apex court to address and decide on whether modern society should continue to bear with “menstrual discrimination” when the Indian Constitution mandates right to equality and health of women to achieve gender justice.

As you read this, perhaps you think, "wait a second, this is bizarre."  But, bizarre is in the eye of the faithful.  Barring menstruating women from temples is not bizarre to many believers (including women), just as wrapping up women in burqas is not bizarre to another group of the faithful.  Many churches in old Europe do not allow female tourists in skirts or without a scarf over their heads--bizarre faith-based practice.  What is bizarre to one is apparently holy to another!

Why only the Sabarimala temple?  The "Happy to Bleed" campaign began after this:

"A time will come when people will ask if all women should be disallowed from entering the temple throughout the year," Prayar Gopalakrishnan, who recently took charge of the hilltop temple dedicated to Lord Ayyappa, told reporters earlier this month.
"These days there are machines that can scan bodies and check for weapons. There will be a day when a machine is invented to scan if it is the 'right time' for a woman to enter the temple. When that machine is invented, we will talk about letting women inside," he added. 

Ah yes, surely science and technology can deliver such a gadget--there are plenty of smart Indians, women too, who can work on it ;)

Back to the high court in India:

At a preliminary hearing on Friday, Justice Misra had asked whether the Vedas, Upanishads and scriptures discriminate between men and women. “Is spirituality solely within the domain of men? Are you saying that women are incapable of attaining spirituality within the domain of religion? Can you deprive a mother?” Justice Misra had asked.

Now, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to, therefore, conjecture that women cannot be priests at temples, right?  That controversy will be for another day! All this atheist can do is observe such happenings and comment on this mad, mad, mad religious world ;)

Source

Neither god nor capitalism works in mysterious ways!

The hippie, er, Pope, is on a tear talking up the environment and criticizing capitalism, which will certainly make the right-wing Catholics wonder if Francis is some kind of a Manchurian Candidate ;)  One of the problems I have with the faith-based people, which includes not only the religious but also those who make religions of their favorite causes, is that they often tend to obfuscate facts or even try to hide them.  Ricardo Hausman goes after the Pope with facts.  But, first, what was the Holy See's problem with capitalism?

Pope Francis said in a recent speech in Bolivia: “This system is by now intolerable: farm workers find it intolerable, laborers find it intolerable, communities find it intolerable, peoples find it intolerable. The earth itself – our sister, Mother Earth, as Saint Francis would say – also finds it intolerable.”

Typically, this is what happens when preaching to the choir--there is no dissent. The audience, in fact, leaves even more strengthened in their "faith," which in this case is that all the problems of this world can be attributed to capitalism.

Except for an inconvenient truth--our lives have become way more tolerable than conditions have ever been only thanks to capitalism.  If the Industrial Revolution marks as an easy to reference starting point for the economic system that we now practice, all one has to do is think about life as it was prior to that time period.  How many among us would want to live in the conditions that existed, say, 300 years ago?  (The Pope would, I am sure, because the Vatican was immensely more powerful and influential back then!)

Hausman writes:

In poverty-stricken Bolivia, Francis criticized “the mentality of profit at any price, with no concern for social exclusion or the destruction of nature,” along with “a crude and naive trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system.”...
Francis is right to focus attention on the plight of the world’s poorest. Their misery, however, is not the consequence of unbridled capitalism, but of a capitalism that has been bridled in just the wrong way. 

I am no rah-rah fan of capitalism, as the regular readers know all too well.  But then there is no way I will engage in a rhetorical wholesale condemnation either.  Because, there are far too many nuances to think about.  Consider one of the many sweeping accusations of "profit at any price."  Of course, there are atrocious practices like pollution or ill-treatment of the workers, primarily thanks to how those with money are able to rope the government in and get away with such crimes.  But, there is also the other side of the same system that encourages investments even when they do not generate big time profits at all.

You are perhaps thinking that it is so un-capitalistic for the system to voluntarily support when we think it is always "profit at any price."  James Surowiecki writes about " two common but ultimately questionable assumptions":

 The first is that corporate decision-makers care only about the short term. The second is that it’s the stock market that makes them think this way.

Quick. Can you think about capitalistic behavior that has resulted in strong support for companies that don't seem to generate profits?  Stumped?

Of course, there’s no shortage of investors who are myopic. But the market, for the most part, isn’t. That’s why companies like Amazon and Tesla and Netflix, whose profits in the present have typically been a tiny fraction of their market caps, have been able to command colossal valuations. It’s why there’s a steady flow of I.P.O.s for companies with small revenues and nonexistent earnings. And it’s why the biotech industry is now valued at more than a trillion dollars, even though many of the firms have yet to bring a single drug to market. None of these things are what you’d expect from a market dominated by short-term considerations.

Back when the Pope ruled the world, freedom was not known to most of the world, except for a tiny few who were the rich and the powerful.  It was a world of slavery and diseases and tortures and short-lives and poverty and starvation.  We have a lot more to do in order to address diseases and poverty and starvation and many more human sufferings.  But, no soaring rhetoric condemning capitalism will deliver any miracles, even if the faithful blindly believe in the power of miracles.

Source

The truth is out there ...

There is no faith in science.

Because, one does not need faith in science.  The scientific method in the pursuit of explanations should convince anybody that the truth is out there, and that the truth cannot be hidden for long either.  There is no concept of only a few divinely chosen few having access to the truth.

Well, that is what a rational mind would think.  But then there are the nutcases, at the extreme right wing as well as the extreme left side, who think that they know better.

And they even go one step beyond that when they claim that scientists are cooking up some conspiracy together.  Here in the US of A--not in some caricatured traditional society!

A Distinguished Research Professor of Marine Chemistry at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego writes about the exchanges he has had with climate change deniers, and concludes there:

 In “The Inquisition of Climate Change” (2011), James Powell wrote, “I have come to believe that in the denial of global warming, we are witnessing the most vicious, and so far most successful, attack on science in history.”
I now have a firsthand appreciation of this entrenched hostility to science, especially that related to global climate change and future warming. What I do not understand is the reason for this hostility. 

It is one heck of a bizarre society in which I live, with all kinds of lunatics waging wars against reason, convinced about their faith in whatever narrative it is that suits them.

What the deniers don't understand is this: yes, scientists might get something wrong.  But, it is the same scientific method to pursue the explanations that also then uncovers the mistakes.  Like in this case, in which a study claimed that "rats fed Monsanto's GM corn had suffered tumours and multiple organ failure."

The publisher of a controversial and much-criticised study suggesting genetically modified corn caused tumours in rats has withdrawn the paper after a year-long investigation found it did not meet scientific standards.

Tada!  The truth is out there!

A friend sent me a link to this note from the American Meteorological Society, in the context of the misleading ways in which a climate change denying group had gone about a survey:

Rather than take someone else’s interpretation of the survey results, read the paper yourself and draw your own conclusions.  It is freely available here as an Early Online Release.
A difference between the AMS and some organizations is the transparency and scientific integrity with which we operate.  This survey was conducted to satisfy scientific curiosity on an important topic and the results are published for all to see.  This is the way science is meant to work.

If only corporations and government, too, were as transparent in their processes as the scientific method is!  Oh, but should we wish for such transparency?

Faith

"Faith-based" economics?

In expressing his frustration with the inability of economists to give a single bottom-line, President Truman asked for a one-handed economist. President Obama sarcastically noted that these days everybody think they are economists.

As I have noted earlier, it is all because while economists pretend that their field of study is as scientific as is physics, the reality is that economics is nothing but a game of intelligent estimates. Best guesses, that come out of critical thinking and evidence. That is all.

So, it was quite fun to read the following in the Economist:

Economics (parts of it, at least) is broken, and mathematicians, sociologists, psychologists, and a bevy of other armchair -ologists are trying to fix it. At the Times, Anatole Kaletsky describes just a few of the ongoing attempts to bring knowledge from other disciplines into the dismal science. He mentions work done by students of aerodynamics and behavioural scientists, among others. But the most intriguing idea in the piece is that while it's possible our ideas are failing to accurately describe the economy, it could also be the case that the economy is failing because it's built on our inaccurate ideas:

[R]ational investors can find it very profitable to act on false premises - for example that credit will always be available without limit - if these false ideas become so widely accepted that they change the way the economy actually functions, at least for a time...

[T]he challenge that existing economic orthodoxy may find most disconcerting is Imperfect Knowledge Economics (IKE), the name of a path-breaking recent book by Roman Frydman and Michael Goldberg, two American economists. Building on ideas of Edmund Phelps, one of the few Nobel Laureate economists who rejected the consensus view on rational expectations, IKE uses similar tools to conventional economics to generate radically different results. It insists that the future is inherently unknowable and therefore that there is always a multitude of plausible models of the way the economy works.

Which model is right may well depend upon which model is the current dominant paradigm. This is quite headache-inducing. It suggests that economics may be plagued by observer effects; by investigating one aspect of a system and solidifying knowledge about it into widely held principles, we reinforce those principles, which proceed to work until they don't.

This is the inherent risk in studying a complex system constructed on the aggregated decisions of billions of creatures who base their actions on the actions of everyone else. The science contributes to feedback, which biases the science. Ideally, some brilliant individual will discover a way around this hurdle. In any case, the first lesson economists may learn in the wake of the crisis is that they actually know much less than they think they do. Or rather, they know what they know, only so long as other people continue to know it.

More mixing of religion and state?

I don't think continuing the current administration's foray into mixing religion and government is a good idea:

Obama will create a President’s Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships
As Barack Obama has said many times, he believes that change comes not from the top-down, but from the bottom-up, and few are closer to the people than our churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques. And many of the challenges we face today—from saving our planet to ending poverty—are simply too big for government to solve alone. We need all hands on deck.

That’s why Obama will help draw on their strength of these groups through the creation of a new President’s Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.

July 2nd uppdate:
The headline of a beliefnet blog says it all: Obama: Bush's Faith-Based Plan Didn't Go Far Enough!