Against the Stream

Video Games and Morality: My "Different Drummers" Interview

Greater Chicago Broadcast Ministry has a show called "Different Drummers" that they post on their Youtube Channel. A few weeks ago they invited me in for an interview. Here it is:

 

It was a fun and interesting experience, though I admit it was a bit disconcerting to talk about these issues while the young man being interviewed with me was blowing away bad guys on the screen right behind me!

The Best Source for News on Mormonism? "The Daily Show" and "Colbert"

Jana Reiss at Religion News Service relates her experience in finding that the best place to see her religion fairly presented on television is on Comedy Central:

Last weekend at a retreat I attended, one of the highlights was a late-night popcorn fest where dozens of Mormon women sat together to laugh uproariously at a year's worth of Mormon-related clips from The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. ...

Then this week Jon Stewart hit the nail on the head once again with this fantabulous monologue about Mormonism and Mitt Romney. Even the ominous opening music pokes fun at recent media coverage of Mormonism, which so often panders to fearmongering.

How much of Mormonism's racist past is Romney personally accountable for? Stewart showed clips of various commentators weighing in on how Mitt should be held to a higher standard, and then summed it up with this brilliant take-away line:

Boys, you can’t cherry-pick the worst aspects of a religion and then hold every member of that religion solely responsible for it. It’s not even relevant. It’s not like Mitt Romney will pursue policies that are unfair to black people because he’s a Mormon.... He’ll do that because he’s a Republican. –Jon Stewart, May 2, 2012

My thanks to Jon Stewart and his entire writing team for being equal-opportunity satirists. When Mormons do something stupid, which we will, I have no doubt that they will nail us for it. This is right and good. But I appreciate the fact that on The Daily Show, Mormonism is regarded as no more or less inherently ridiculous than any other religion.

We need to be willing to laugh at ourselves, because all of our faiths are fanitly ridiculous, particularly when seen from the outside. But we all are also entitled to see our faiths fairly presented, even in satire. That's something that Stewart and Colbert have over vituperative atheists like Bill Maher, and we should be grateful for it.

Colbert on Ryan, Rand, and Jesus's Preferred Tax Policy

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

Bear Patrol Redux

 

Once again I note that the apologists of torture are inclined to use the same kind of reasoning as Homer Simpson does to justify the existence of a bear patrol:

Coming toward the middle of the second half of the interview, Rodriguez justifies the whole thing with strange and wonderful (not) logic. Essentially, the argument is that because we don't know whether there would have been attacks without detaining and torturing these operatives, they succeeded. Also? We don't know whether Martians would have landed, or an earthquake would have dropped half of California in the ocean. So many unknowns, so few detainees. Rodriguez does a terrific job of trying to pull a fast one though, saying that the mythical anthrax and nuclear programs hatched by al Qaeda were stopped in their tracks. Just like that.

It's easy to stop something that didn't exist in the first place.

And here's Homer Simpson applying the same logic:

Homer: Not a bear in sight. The Bear Patrol must be working like a charm!

Lisa: That’s specious reasoning, dad.

Homer: Why thank you, honey. Lisa: By your logic, I could claim that this rock keeps tigers away.

Homer: How does it work?

Lisa: It doesn’t work; it’s just a stupid rock!

Homer: Uh-huh.

Lisa: But I don’t see any tigers around, do you?

Homer: Hmm . . . Lisa, I want to buy your rock. 

Joel Osteen, Gay Marriage, and Discrimination

 

Someone needs to teach the unctuous Joel Osteen the meaning of the word "discrimination":

In an interview on Fox News Sunday, host Chris Wallace asked the pastor if being gay was a sin.

"I believe that the scripture says that being gay is a sin," Osteen smiled. "You know, every time I say that, Chris, I get people saying, 'You're a gay hater and you're a gay basher.' I'm not. I don't dislike anybody. Gays are some of the nicest, kindest, most loving people in the world. But my faith is based on what the scripture says, and that's the way I read the scripture."

Wallace also pressed the preacher on the issue of marriage equality.

"I don't think we should discriminate against anybody," Osteen replied. "There was an issue where somebody couldn't go visit a gay loved one in the hospital. I don't think that's right. I think they love each other. So, I think there should be some [rights]."

"I'm not for gay marriage, but I'm not for discriminating against people."

Right. Because excluding an entire group of people from participation in a cornerstone social institution is ... not discrimination?

And, let's be honest: Osteen's alleged "faith" may be a lot of things, but one thing it absolutely isn't is "based in scripture."

Israel, the Occupation, and Palestinian Christians

A CBS "60 Minutes" report on the status of Christians in the West Bank that aired on April 22nd.

 

Let me stipulate a point made by Micahel Oren: It is true that, relative to many other places in the Middle East today, Christians in the West Bank have it pretty good, and Israeli Christians somewhat better. But the point is that this status is relative. Christians in Israel (at least those of Palestinian descent*) and the Occupied territories suffer enormous hardship and oppression by virtue of being Palestinian. But while Michael Oren may have an argument that those who are concerned for the treatment of Palestinian Christians ought to speak out just as vocally about the persecution of Christians in other parts of the Middle East it is worth noting that a) very often, they do; and b) failing to speak out in one case does not render it invalid to speak out in another; and c) unlike Israel, these other countries are not the largest single recipient of U.S. foreign aid.

Oren makes an incredibly callous statement about midway through the piece when he says that he regrets the inconvenience caused to Palestinian Christians by the wall, but then goes on to say: "It's their convienience, but it's our survival." While the wall has certainly cut down on terrorism, there's no question about that, there's no reason to believe that it is, on its own, a necessary instrument of Israeli survival, particularly given that there's no reason to believe that acts of terrorism are, in themselves, a threat to Israel's existence.

Finally, it's worth noting that the single most effective means of diminishing terrorism in any situation that is sustained by occupation is to abandon the occupation, reach a just settlement of the dispute and aid in materially improving the lives of those who live there.

*During my last visit to Israel, it was pointed out to me that the fastest growing segment of Israeli Christians is actually not among the Palestinians but among the Chrisitans spouses of Jewish emigrees from Eastern Europe and Russia.

Religion in "Game of Thrones"

Alyssa Rosenberg interviews Bryan Cogman about (among other things) the role of religion in Westeros in light of the events of last week's episode:

One thing we see in this episode—and that gives the episode its title—is a baptism, and Jon Snow also gets something of a theology lesson. Given your role as keeper of Game of Thrones mythology, what role do you think religion plays in the franchise? And do you think there are particular challenges in bringing religions where gods are active in the world, and fealty, which is a similar emotion to worship, to a modern audience?

George’s exploration of religion is, without question, one of my favorite aspects of his story. It plays an increasingly significant role as the series goes on, not only in the lives of the various characters but in the “game” itself. Last season, faith was largely depicted in a personal way — Ned’s quiet vigil under the weirwood tree, Cat’s homemade shrine to the Seven, etc. This season, we begin to see how religious faith is used in the pursuit of power, specifically with Stannis and Melisandre. And while the various religions in our story (the Seven, the Lord of Light, the Drowned God) were born out of George’s imagination and are somewhat fantastical, I think modern audiences can definitely relate while watching. I would say that “gods” are very “active” in our own world, especially when it comes to those in the pursuit of power — you need only examine some of the rhetoric from the candidates in the current presidential race to find examples of that.

I for one am hoping that Martin has some grand plan with regard to the various religious threads he's weaving in this story. Though I think he's come right out and said that the God's themselves won't be making any direct appearances.

Sunnydale's New Slayer? Pat Robertson!

Chapter and Verse

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Stanley Fish in the New York Times talks about a conversation on Up: With Chris Hayes last weekend on connections between religious belief and denial of global warming:

Dawkins and Pinker replied that you ask them to show you their evidence — the basis of their claim to be taken seriously — and then you show them yours, and you contrast the precious few facts they have with the enormous body of data collected and vetted by credentialed scholars and published in the discipline’s leading journals. Point, game, match.

Not quite. Pushed by Hayes, who had observed that when we accept the conclusions of scientific investigation we necessarily do so on trust (how many of us have done or could replicate the experiments?) and are thus not so different from religious believers, Dawkins and Pinker asserted that the trust we place in scientific researchers, as opposed to religious pronouncements, has been earned by their record of achievement and by the public rigor of their procedures. In short, our trust is justified, theirs is blind.

Fish goes on to note Dawkins' rather startling (and no doubt unconscious) reversion to the argument from doctrinal authority when he declares that when questioned about their theories, scientists can refer to studies and "cite chapter and verse" in support of their position. Fish parlays that into a typically fishian point about the subjectivity of all authority, and up to a point I'm with him, but the issues isn't quite as subjectivistic as I think he wants to make it.

On the one hand, Fish is right that we all start from some set of first principles or another -- even Stephen Pinker, even Richard Dawkins. And in matters of first principles, there really is no way to determine in some "objective" sense which set of first principles is the "true" set. If I choose to cite "chapter and verse" from the Bible and claim that as my set of first principles, how is that in any way necessarily inferior to someone who chooses to cite "chapter and verse" from a scientific study, particularly when they are citing technical studies that are not widely read and not likely to be understood by their audience, who will ultimately resort to saying something like "Well, I believe in evolutionary theory because Richard Dawkins!" There is, for ordinary laypeople, no real engagement with the actual data of scientific theories, and so we take it on faith as much as we take religious doctrines on faith.

On the other hand, to take a religious doctrine on faith is a different sort of thing than to take a scientific theory on faith, and therein lies the tension. Dawkins and Pinker rightly reply that their data are publicly accessible and anyone who wants to investigate it honestly can, and will likely come to the same conclusions (say, about climate change). Or they might not, they might point to some authentic hole in the data that will open up new avenues of investigation, and that is all to the good. That's how science is supposed to work. When it's corrupted, say by global warming skeptics who are wholly owned subsidiaries of oil companies, then the process of scientific investigation is thwarted.

But to take a religious doctrine on faith is not about "evidence" in the same way that a scientific theory is about evidence. The evidence of a religious claim is rooted in precisely the kinds of experience that are inaccessible to science, in the same way that aesthetic judgements or statements about personal states of being are inaccessible to science. To use two examples that I've deployed frequently in the past: What scientific theory will tell me whether its true that Picasso's Guernica is the greatest piece of 20th century art? In the same vein, what scientific theory will tell me whether my mother truly loves me? Science can't help me on either of those fronts because they are not scientific questions, namely questions about the physical or natural world, it's processes and its states. The problem with Pinker and Dawkins is that they expect science to do too much. They expect it to be capable of answering questions that it is simply not set up to answer.

What that means is that, while it may not be possible to argue from first principles that one should prefer a scientific worldview to a religious worldview, it is absolutely possible to argue that scientific and religious worldviews answer different kinds of questions, and therefore can be true and valid in their own, quite different ways. This is not quite the same as Stephen Jay Gould's NOMA principle, which says that these domains have nothing to do with one another. Rather, they may investigate the same phenomena, and come to very different kinds of conclusions, while still informing one another from within their own domains.

Religion makes a mistake when it thinks that it can provide answers about the nature of physical processes as physical processes. But science, at least as practiced by Dawkins an Pinker, makes a mistake when it thinks that science can provide answers about questions of ultimate concern or the nature of God. It lacks the tools to meaningfully answer such questions. But at the same time, one can rationally make the kinds of distinctions that would allow religion and science to meaningfully converse with one another on the basis of their own domains, and even chastise one another when they cross over to the wrong side of the argument. Unfortunately, these days the state of the debate is such that crossing over the wrong side is more the norm among the talking heads then the exception, as the Christ Hayes conversation regrettably demonstrates.

The Wire and the Church

 

Fred Clark of Slacktivist draws the parallels by imagining how a 6th season of The Wire might have turned its focus to yet another venerable Baltimore Institution:

If you’re interested in reviving or renewing the institutional church, then before consulting those many books, I recommend that you watch all five seasons of The Wire.

It shouldn’t be hard to draw the parallels and to make the analogies that will allow you to imagine exactly what Season 6 would look like, set in your own city or town. Look at the top brass of the BPD — the cronies and careerists and ladder-climbing, power-seeking incompetents obsessed with their own importance. Look at the mid-level leadership, the lieutenants and sergeants “gaming the stats” because they have more incentive to do that than to do the job itself. Look at Lester Freamon, natural police and a master of the craft, exiled to the Pawn Shop Unit for 13 years and four months because he did the job instead of playing the game. Look at Bunny Colvin, punished for the unpardonable sin of effectiveness.

Do any of these people look familiar? Do any of these stories remind you of anything? The characters, stories and themes of The Wire resonate in any institution. Not only in the church, but certainly there.

All I have to do is imagine any current Bishop in any diocese in the country trying to cover up an abuse scandal, and the whole season more or less writes itself. Clearly Jimmy McNulty would be working for the families of the victims (and cutting corners as he always does), someone will get murdered and Bunk will investigate, and the slimy report dude will make some shit up to land another Pulitzer.