My scanner is working again, thanks to my nephew's efforts, so I can upload that page from the American Mercury of September 1956 containing the original version of the "religionists" quotation so often falsely attributed to Patrick Henry:
Once again let me point out that the burden of proof is on anybody claiming that a quotation is genuine. This alleged Patrick Henry quotation fails the test in all possible ways.
The Roanoke Times asks this question in an online "poll" to which, as asked, the only correct answer is "no". Why do I say that--I, who am an advocate of teaching the Bible as one of the great classics of western civilization? I who believe that all our classics are being sadly neglected in an educational system intent on supplying factory workers for the gigantic assembly lines of yesteryear? Especially when the class in question is to be taught by a "20-year veteran, properly licensed, one of our most praised and most valued faculty members," according to school board chairman James Stephens. "She has the good judgment to make sure she does not get into proselytizing and keep it in an academic format," he claims.
The answer: This class is based on the course put out by the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools, a known purveyor of fake history. Check out their website. Try the Founding Fathers page, for example. What do we find there? Well, first there's the bizarre assertion that "The Bible was the foundation and blueprint for our Constitution, Declaration of Independence, our educational system, and our entire history until the last 20 to 30 years." This is at the very least a considerable overstatement; in point of fact the Bible was neither the foundation or the blueprint for any of those things, ever. Not in the last twenty to thirty years, not in the last century, not at all. This is crazy talk--but not just crazy talk. It is far worse than that. It is Christian Nation talk.
Next we have a quotation attributed to Patrick Henry. No, it isn't the one I trashed the other day; this is a different one. "The Bible is a book worth more than all the other books that were ever printed," said Patrick Henry, according to this site. Well, not exactly. What Patrick Henry allegedly said of the Bible--and what we have is only a third-hand report--"Here is a book worth more than all the other books that were ever printed : yet it is my misfortune never to have found time to read it, with the proper attention and feeling, till lately. I trust in the mercy of Heaven, that it is not yet too late." This anecdote first appeared in William Wirt's Sketches of the Life and Character of Patrick Henry (1818; p. 402); his source, apparently, was a letter from George Dabney. In other words what we have here is not something actually written by Patrick Henry, but only something that somebody else said he said--and lacking the letter, we don't even know if Dabney heard this himself, or only reported what somebody else had told him.
After this we come to a quotation attributed to, of all people, Horace Greeley. Apparently it has somehow escaped the NCBCPS's notice that Horace Greeley was not one of the Founding Fathers. He was a newspaper editor who belonged to the Civil War generation, an anti-slavery advocate, a contemporary of Lincoln, the Let The Erring Sisters Go Their Ways guy. Still, what is he supposed to have said? "It is impossible to enslave mentally or socially a Bible reading people. The principles of the Bible are the groundwork of human freedom." Is this a genuine quotation? No source is given, either here, or in any of the other works quoting this that I could run down. It sounds like the sort of thing Greeley might have written. He liked the word groundwork and the expression human freedom. He was a Bible-reader from way back, having learned to read from it at the age of four. He was no doubt aware of the way the story of Moses was read by the slaves as a metaphor for their own liberation, and could well have had this in mind. But I couldn't find it, in spite of going through a number of Greeley's works. The oldest source I could locate (and this thanks to Google search) was an 1889 volume entitled Vital Questions: The Discussions of the General Christian Conference Held in Montreal, Que., Canada, October 22nd to 28th, 1888. On pp. 197-98 we read:
And so of our own and all other lands. Romish dogma we know to be a source of religious, social, and national peril. "But it is impossible," said one of the great leaders of public thought in America, " to mentally and socially enslave a Bible-reading people, for the principles of the Bible are the ground-work of human freedom."
The "great leader of public thought in America" isn't named, but Greeley would certainly qualify. However, neither this nor any other work that gave this alleged quotation gave any source, beyond attributing it to Horace Greeley. The burden of proof, remember, is on the person who would claim this as genuine.
Moving on, we have "I have always said, and will always say, that studious perusal of the sacred volume will make us better citizens." This is attributed to Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson, at least, actually was a Founding Father, but the quotation isn't much to boast of. In this case the source is known, thanks to Chris Rodda, and it is both misquoted (surprise) and second-hand. It appears in a letter written by Daniel Webster describing a conversation he had had with Jefferson a quarter of a century earlier. Supposedly Jefferson told him, "I have always said, and always will say, that the studious perusal of the sacred volume will make better citizens, better fathers, and better husbands." Unfortunately, that same letter shows Jefferson's opinion of church-state relations: he said that "Sunday schools ... presented the only legitimate means, under the constitution, of avoiding the rock upon which the French republic was wrecked." Not public schools, if you please, but Sunday schools.
Finally we have a few random assertions.
While President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson was elected the first president of the Washington, D.C. public school board, which used the Bible as a reading text in the classroom.
I'll let Chris Rodda handle this one:
This myth about Jefferson and the Washington D.C. schools was created by combining two things. One is that, in 1805, Jefferson was elected president of the Washington City school board. The other is an 1813 report by the teacher of one of the city's early public schools, showing that the Bible and Watts's Hymns were used as reading texts in that school. The problem with the story is that the school that these books were used in didn't exist until several years after Jefferson left Washington and the school board.
In other words, this one is just a plain, or garden, lie. Next.
There was a secular study done by the American Political Science Review on the political documents of the Founding era, which was 1760-1805.
This study found that 94% of the documents that went into the Founding ERA were based on the Bible, and of that 34% of the contents were direct quotations from the Bible.
Why people pay attention to preposterous statistics would probably make a fascinating study for somebody to undertake, but I'm not going to worry about it right now. Ninety-four percent of Founding era documents are based on the Bible? Come on...that's just not credible. The fact is that the study says nothing about ninety-four percent of Founding Era documents being based on the Bible--nothing. What the study actually says is that thirty-four percent of the citations in Founding Era documents are from the Bible. The study also says that three quarters of these citations are from printed sermons; if we leave these out of the picture, then the figure for Biblical citations drops to eight and a half percent.
The thing is, why should we trust a curriculum designed by people who use dubious quotations (and then can't even get them right), who think that Horace Greeley was one of the Founding Fathers, who get even simple facts wrong, and who cite preposterous (and bogus) statistics without any sense of shame? These people are either blitheringly incompetent, or shameless liars. Either way they have no business putting together a course on anything whatsoever, and no teacher, no matter how well-intentioned, ought to have to use such a steaming pile of horse manure. Selah.
At least, that's the opinion apparently entertained by one Kristin Butler, a proud graduate of Duke University. Duke of course is known mainly for its outstanding work in the field of parapsychology, the science of matter over mind. According to Kristin Butler a "mentally unstable" person--or "loony" as she apparently prefers--has no business receiving a diploma, whether she has completed the requirements or not. This is an interesting attitude, and I would really like to know exactly why having bipolar disorder--that's the lunacy in question--disbars a student from receiving a degree. I got a degree, in spite of having undergone treatment for depression, and in spite of suffering from unreasonable fears and compulsions. And frankly, I take that kind of crack personally. I have a cousin with bipolar disorder, and while she's never received a degree from a prestigious university like Duke, she is in fact one of the most outstanding researchers I've ever met. I personally have respect for people who make it in spite of drawbacks and disadvantages over which they do not have control, and I am very much unimpressed when some scatter-brained young know-it-all sounds off with a moronic screed like Summa cum loony. Grow up, Kristin Butler.
[Thanks to Chronicle Column Damages NCCU/Duke Relations and "Summa cum loony" - the Duke lacrosse case lives on for alerting to this garbage.]
There are few people that I personally despise more than canonical critics, but Christian Nationites are almost certainly among them. David Barton and his gang of loony liars have done more than a small part in undermining American values and destroying the fabric of this once great nation--and continue to today, thanks to the National Council On Bible Curriculum In Public Schools, the late D. James Kennedy, and other unscrupulous types more concerned about making a buck off the gullible than about the survival of the nation that brought them up. One of the tricks of their nefarious trade is the invention of fake quotations from the Founding Fathers designed to make them look like modern Christian Nationites. Many of them have been discredited; others lurk in the limbo of the unknown.
It is not always appreciated that the Founding Fathers were a diverse lot with differing opinions on exactly how the new nation ought to be put together. Some of them favored having a state religion, as all respectable nations had in their time. Others--Jefferson, Washington, Madison, for example--favored keeping religion out of government altogether. This was the winning faction.
Among the famous Founding Fathers on the wrong side of that particular issue was Patrick Henry, slave-owner and the reputed author of the words "Give me liberty, or give me death." He undoubtedly did write some pretty crazy stuff about church-state relations, but--did he say, as the Christian Nationites claim:
It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions, but on the gospel of Jesus Christ!
Okay, it's tripe, but that's not really the point. Some people are obviously impressed with it. A quick check of Google Books reveals its popularity. One book is listed as having this quotation in 1994, another in 1996, and still one more in 2000. Starting with 2002, however, it begins to take off. Three books quote it in 2002, four in 2003, six in 2004, and seventeen in 2005. While that was a high point, ten books quote it in 2006, eleven in 2007, and two this year.
Well, you can't argue with success, right? If so many authors use it, well, then Patrick Henry must have said it. The market has spoken, as Stephen Colbert would say.
Still, there is one oddity at least. Nobody seems to have heard of this saying before 1994. Now Google books is a neat little tool, but it is far from infallible. However, if Patrick Henry had really said, or written, or muttered this little piece of garbage, you'd think it would show up somewhere. And in fact Patrick Henry scholars have searched his recorded words, and found--nothing.
Even though it doesn't show up in the Google books search, the saying apparently first appeared (at least as Patrick Henry's) in The Myth of Separation by David Barton in 1988. Barton himself has since repudiated it, describing it as "unconfirmed" in his WallBuilder's website. He does hold out hope that it will turn out to be genuine, however, citing some absolutely irrelevant quotations by and about Patrick Henry, a cheesy trick that used to be exploited by the brave Cold War liars who promulgated fake quotations attributed to Lenin, Stalin, and other Communist leaders. (Anybody else remember Stormer's None Dare Call It Treason?) Humorously Barton goes on to make the suggestion (without giving the slightest evidence to support it) that "there is a possibility that the unconfirmed quote came from Henry's uncle, the Reverend Patrick Henry. We find no record of the Reverend's letters or writings. Therefore," he suggests, "until more definitive documentation can be presented, please avoid the words in question."
Need I remind the Myth of Separation author that the burden of proof is always on the person who puts forth a quotation as genuine? Cite your source, damn it--cite it. That's all you have to do. The works of the Founding Fathers are not even that hard come by, for the most part. You usually can find them in multi-volume sets of speeches and letters and publications and all like that there. If you got took by a bum secondary source--well, them are the breaks. At least if you've cited it, people will know who to blame.
In this case, however, it should have been clear that something was off in the brew. The word "religionists"--it ain't right. The word's been around since the seventeenth century, and our patriot could have used it--but not in the sense it's used here. That's pure twentieth-century, not Patrick Henry's era in the least. In his time a religionist was a fanatic, somebody obsessed with religion. The author of this quotation, however, is using it in a strange generic sense, meaning apparently people of different religions joined together, or something of that sort.
Of course the answer to this riddle is simple--these words were not written or spoken by Patrick Henry. Nor did they come from Patrick Henry's uncle (a ridiculous idea, by the way). Here is the quotation in context:
"I have now disposed of all my property to my family. There is one thing more I wish I could give them, and that is the Christian Religion. If they had that and I had not given them one shilling they would have been rich; and if they had not that and I had given them all the world, they would be poor."
Patrick Henry, Virginia,
His Will
"There is an insidious campaign of false propaganda being waged today, to the effect that our country is not a Christian country but a religious one--that it was not founded on Christianity but on freedom of religion.
"It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded not by 'religionists' but by Christians--not on religion but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ. For this very reason, peoples of other faiths have been afforded asylum, prosperity and freedom of worship here.
"In the spoken and written words of our noble founders and forefathers, we find symbolic expressions of their Christian faith. The above quotation from the will of Patrick Henry is a notable example."
I got this from the September 1956 issue of The American Mercury (p. 134) where it appears as a page filler. Their source: the April 1956 issue of The Virginian, a short-lived segregationist rag.
So dig this, all you dupes and pawns who mindlessly copied the crap that David Barton fed you. These jejune and insipid words you have enshrined in your books and on your websites are not pearls of great price delivered by one of America's patriots. They were written by some anonymous racist hack, the dregs of the era of McCarthy and George Wallace and the Ku Klux Klan. Enjoy the feast--and I hope you choke on it.
My attention was caught by an exchange printed in the Naples Daily News. On the one hand, Ed Weilhoefer, possibly a retired professor of mathematics, wrote a letter to the editor criticizing the creationist propaganda film Expelled. On the other hand we have a "Guest Commentary" by V.J. Falcone, "an adjunct professor at the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut," complaining that "Ed Weilhoefer’s letter the other day was beyond the pale". Adjunct Professor Falcone poses as the voice of reason and moderation, but--
Ed Weilhoefer wrote:
The fact of the matter is that “Expelled” is a propaganda film, produced under false pretenses by a radical front for creationism. Joseph Goebbels’ ghost must be gleeful that his villainous art is alive and flourishing in the United States.V. J. Falcone's response:
Finally, after some unsubstantiated statements which he calls "the fact of the matter," he claims that "Joseph Goebbels’ ghost must be gleeful that his villainous art is alive and well in the United States." Have you counted the number of letter writers who inject the Nazis into their essays? It’s de rigueur: If you disagree with me you are a Nazi, Nazi-like, Nazi-leaning, Nazi-wannabe.
Please. No more Nazi comparisons except when dealing with political issues that justify the allusion.
Nice evasion, Adjunct Professor Falcone, but what about dealing with the actual issue? or is it possible that you really don't know exactly who Joseph Goebbels was? I see that you "[lecture] graduate students in education on the U.S. Constitution, teaching controversial issues, morals and values, and 'thinking about thinking,'" so you certainly ought to know. In case you don't, however, let me inform you that Herr Goebbels is generally regarded as the gold standard for propaganda efforts, whether fake documentaries, fake academic studies, or fake histories. (Although in my opinion, having actually seen some of Goebbels' efforts, they are crude hack-work compared to the work of the Discovery Institute, or other think-tanks I could mention.) If you really didn't know this, you should be ashamed of yourself. Ed Weilhoefer's use does indeed deal with a political issue that justifies the allusion. If you do know, then you, Adjunct Professor Falcone, have gone way beyond the pale in misrepresenting what Ed Weilhoefer actually wrote.
Ed Weilhoefer goes on to refer to the deceptive tactics used by the film-makers to get interviews, and notes that "[t]he film is a diatribe against the American university system and an attempt to undermine science." To this V. J. Falcone has nothing to say. Then comes this passage:
Let’s face it: Americans trail far behind other Western nations in science education and that is one reason why we have so many weird religious beliefs inconsistent with basic science.Here V. J. Falcone has at least half a point. "Any first-year logic student" he writes, "would know that statement is a post hoc fallacy." The United States of course does in fact trail behind many other Western nations in science education and it does indeed have many weird religious beliefs incompatible with the most basic science, but which is cause, and which is effect--who knows? The American tradition of anti-intellectualism probably has a lot to do with both, actually, but the two certainly feed on one another. Anyone who's been involved with one of the brushfires of ignorance breaking out through the country when religious fanatics try to dictate what gets taught in science classes is aware of the negative effect that "weird religious beliefs" have on science education in this country. And most of us who have been through what pass for science courses in the United States know just how bad this alleged education can be and how much that contributes to the craziness of the American religious scene.
Unfortunately V. J. Falcone doesn't stop with that. He goes on to write "By the way, we are behind in math, engineering and a myriad of other disciplines which I think is the result of teaching for 'self esteem' rather than for understanding." That line was old in the fifties, and has virtually nothing to recommend it. Bromides are not a substitute for thought.
Ed Weilhoefer continues:
It is laughable but very sad that Americans believe that the age of our planet is somewhere around 10,000 years.
It is indeed. Recent polls show that Americans do indeed believe this, and in large numbers. This really sets V. J. Falcone off: "I have taught thousands of students," he claims, and "know hundreds of academics and have not met one human being that believes what Mr. Weilhoefer states as fact." I can only suppose that Adjunct Professor Falcone travels in very rarefied circles; perhaps he needs to mix more with ordinary Americans. I've never had any problem running into people who believe exactly that, more's the pity, and to be honest, I really don't believe V. J. Falcone's claim. Maybe he hasn't inquired all that deeply into the beliefs of those thousands of students. Or maybe he's been very lucky in his classes. Back to the original letter:
Creationism or intelligent design is a Christian fundamentalist doctrine.
It's difficult to see how anybody could take exception to this statement, but V. J. Falcone does:
Not so. Intelligent design has been debated from antiquity to the present day.
Plato and Aristotle thought that it was a valid doctrine. Plato calls that power, not God, but an artificer "which causes things to exist, not previously existing ..., not some spontaneous and unintelligent cause."
I, personally, don’t know how life began, and I don’t think anyone else knows to an absolute certainty either.All this jibber-jabber is beneath contempt. If the adjunct professor has a point, he has concealed it to perfection. Plato and Aristotle were pre-scientific thinkers and have absolutely nothing to do with the modern Intelligent Design™ movement, which is a pseudo-scientific disguise for fundamentalist theology. Shifting definitions in mid-stream is an old rhetorical trick, as I'm sure he knows quite well. Oh, yeah, and by the way, the only people who claim to know to a certainty how life began are Creationists, or Intelligent Design Proponents, or whatever they want to call themselves today.
Why the Naples Daily News thought this sub-par composition was worth publishing is beyond me.
Hurricane evacuations will be delayed in the future for Federal authorities to make sure that all evacuees have their papers in order, border agents announced in McAllen, Texas. Immigration officials will be stationed at evacuation hubs in the Rio Grande Valley to prevent people without appropriate documentation from boarding buses.
A spokeswoman for the governor pointed out, "If there is any significant delay in having people move from harm's way, then that could run the risk of endangering lives." The governor wants the border patrol to put public safety first during an emergency.
A representative for the border patrol shrugged off such concerns. "Our local policy is checkpoints will not close, we will check for immigration status," he said. "We have to do our jobs." [Source]
On CNN I hear that John Edwards is endorsing Senator Obama in the Democratic race for President.
And (for anyone who's interested) I still have no idea who I'm going write in for the Republican candidate; even though McCain's a done deal, I'm not voting for him.
I got this one from PZ Myers at Pharyngula (True Monsters): Abdel-Qader Ali, 46, vaguely described as a "government employee," a resident of Basra in Iraq, brutally killed his daughter, Rand Abdel-Qader, 17, a university student. He crushed her windpipe with his boot, strangled her, and then stabbed her, assisted by his two sons. His excuse for this unnatural act: she had become enamored of a British soldier. His punishment: he will flee to Jordan for a month or two to give himself some time for the news to die down. Oh, yes, also his wife left him. He broke her arm after she protested the killing of their daughter.
Government has no business imposing some people’s religious beliefs over others. Especially if it denies people’s civil rights.
I don't get this furore over Dr. Jeremiah Wright. The headline: Pastor of Church Once Attended by Presidential Candidate Talks Crazy. And, I may add, the sun rose this morning. Is this news? Really? Pastor says crazy stuff? What about Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, or Billy Graham, for god's sake? Preachers have been saying really crazy stuff for as long as I can remember, certainly for as long as I have been listening to them. The new morality is really the old immorality. Nixon (of all people) is appointed by God to lead America. Don't understand the Bible--believe it. Herpes, or AIDS, or the flu, are God's punishment for sin. Homosexuals caused nine eleven. And snakes once walked upright.
See, what we who weren't raised in an unhealthy atmosphere of religiosity don't get is what is the difference between one crazy and another? Religious parents stand idly by and watch their eleven year old daughter die an excruciating (and entirely preventable) death and this is supposed to be okay somehow? How is this different from the mother who locked her kids in a car and pushed them in a lake to drown? At least she had the excuse of postpartum depression or something of the sort--what on earth is these idiots' justification? Or what about those muslims in Pakistan who beat a co-worker to death in front of the police, and then excused it by claiming that the dead man (a Hindu, by the way) was a blasphemer. Forgive me, but as far as I can tell the overly religious will do anything, so long as it is utterly vile and absolutely insane.
So tell me again, why should I be upset about something some pastor said? I don't care who attended his church--the guy is a religious nut. Of course he talks crazy. That's his job.
Duke Ellington is 109 today, and still going strong. It was probably in 1960, not long after we had moved to Vancouver Washington, that my father dragged me out of bed down to the record player to hear an album he had just brought home. I recognized the piece--but it wasn't the same, somehow. It was the overture to the Nutcracker, but being played by a jazz band of some kind. My father, knowing that I was a fanatic about observing the artist's intentions, not to mention that I was at that time (I was in fourth grade) a Tchaikovsky enthusiast, figured that I would be outraged.
But I wasn't, for some reason. Instead I was fascinated by the pieces--the similarities and differences from the canonical version, so to speak. This wasn't like the usual vulgarization of high art--Tony the Tiger singing about Sugar Frosted Flakes to the tune of Beethoven's fifth or the like--this was more like a dialog between musicians from different eras. The result: I went through the family music collection and listened to all the Duke Ellington I could get my hands on.
There's no real point to this story--it's just how I happened to encounter the music of the greatest twentieth-century American composer. Again, happy birthday, Duke Ellington, wherever you are.
John Lynch (Stranger Fruit) has a book meme up. It's the "the top 106 books most often marked as 'unread' by LibraryThing's users." The books I've read are in italics; books I never finished are struck through.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault's Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and SensibilityThe Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver's Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela's Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People's History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & LeavesThe Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity's Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers
51 read and 2 unfinished. There are actually a couple more that I've started but didn't get far enough in to even count them as unfinished--War and Peace for one. But as I only read a small portion of that for school, and from an abridged edition of it to boot, I don't feel like counting it. Several of these are among my personal favorite books--Emma, Great Expectation, and A Clockwork Orange, for example. Although there are some real turds on this list--Atlas Shrugged and In Cold Blood are good examples--there are none that I wish I hadn't read. Even Ayn Rand; at least Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead helped inoculate me against the illness of market fundamentalism, Reaganosis, and Friedmanitis.
(Hat tip to Afarensis.)
Five Public Opinions asks what seems to me to be a reasonable question: has Council Nedd II stopped molesting children while he's beating his wife yet? At least it's as reasonable as the question Council Nedd, Bishop of the Chesapeake and Northeast for the Episcopal Missionary Church, chooses to ask on his hate site. Wordpress apparently disagrees.
Yesterday, two great pious leaders of the world met in Washington DC. President Bush has immense temporal power, leading one of the richest countries on the planet with the most potent military force. Pope Benedict is a spiritual leader to a billion people, with immense influence and the responsibility of a long religious legacy. What could they have talked about? Mostly, they seem to have patted each other on the back and congratulated each other on their commitment to superstition....
Bush calls us a nation of prayer — a depressing label that makes us a country of delusions. Worse, he claims that we respect life as sacred, a lie straight from his lips. How can George Bush claim our country does not debase and discard human lives? ...
The great pious Catholic Pope stands before this man, and what does he say? Does he mention that Jesus asked that we do to others as we would have them do to us? Does he remind him that they call their religious figurehead the "Prince of Peace", and that he asked us to turn the other cheek when we were struck, or that he asked that we protect the poor and weak? Does he point out that the central event in their shared faith was the torture and execution of their prophet and god, and that the New Testament isn't about emulating the heroic Romans?
No, of course not. An obscenely wealthy old man heading an organization that protects child abusers and advocates horrendous and ignorant social practices that harm the poor all around the world would look utterly hypocritical even trying to rebuke a war-monger and apologist for torture. So instead he stands there and tells him that they share common principles founded in fear of a nebulous god. ...
There's an evil tableau for you: the callous torturer stands up with blood on his hands and a lie in his teeth, while the priest draped in gilt reassures him of his righteousness. How often has that scene played out in history, I wonder?
There was a time when many members of the press and many citizens of this country would rend their garments about what they would "tell the children" about sex in the White House. Oddly, they seem to be unconcerned about what to tell the children about torture being devised and approved in the same place. That tells you something about the provincial Village that runs our politics.
The whole Darwin-to-Hitler link in Stein's wretched little movie is a totally meaningless exercise. It's a line of pure and utter bullshit, and even if we were to accept it as absolute truth, it would be irrelevant. Truth and morality are two different things.
The internet is supposed to be back up here, but I'm not confident on anything. Does it matter? Probably not in some cosmic sense, but as far as my personal space is concerned, yes. I like to think that I can communicate whatever thought flits through my brain at any hour of the day or night--it didn't used to be that way, but now I'm used to it, and I want to keep it. Blogging on my laptop is amazing--news from all over the world at my fingertips, and I can join it at any moment and in theory at least be read by anybody else who is connected with this nebulous thing we call the internet. It's like the old ham radio universe, except that people talk about anything and everything, and not just their rig. It's the bulletin-board of the global village, and it's downright amazing--but I'm used to it now, and it's just a goddamn annoyance when I can't get on it.
Earlier today I needed to check a reference in a nearly-century-old book. I actually own a copy of it, and for once it isn't packed away in storage somewhere but is right on my shelves in the library upstairs where I can get at it. But I was comfortable on the davenport where I was, and I was working on my laptop, so I quickly went to Google Books, invoked the book genii, and in seconds had my reference. All I had to do was send out a request to a machine hundreds of miles away, have it look up the book for me, and receive digital copies of the pages I needed right on the screen in front of me. Infinitely simpler than getting up, walking upstairs, pulling the book off the shelf, and physically finding the passage. Something doesn't seem right about that, but that was the way of it, for all that.
Do I have a point? Not really. It's good to be back online, but my connection with the outer world feels increasingly perilous, and it worries me.
For what it's worth the internet keeps going out here, and nobody seems to know why. When the Comcastic people come by, the system magically comes back to life, but then it goes down again as soon as they are gone. Today they came out, listened to the signals with their magic gear, replaced a couple of things, and vanished. Once again the internet is working, but for how long? I don't know, and maybe I never will. I hope to have further material soon, but, given my past track record, I don't advise holding your breath till I surface again.
A wartime president who has no real allies and whose own military is too small to achieve such lofty goals should begin to scale back his rhetoric so that it has at least a patina of plausibility. By defining victory in Iraq as an outcome that lays "the foundations for peace for generations to come," George W. Bush ensures that defeat is nearly inevitable.
Neil Aspinall, the fifth Beatle, died recently. We read that Paul McCartney was at his bedside. It seems appropriate and it might even be true, though with the ex-Beatles you never really know. The event prompted one write to ask just how many fifth Beatles there were, anyway. Good question. In a way there was no more a fifth Beatle than there is a fifth gospel, simply because the question is essentially meaningless. Where do you start, exactly?
When the Beatles first came onto the radar in America there were four of them--John, Paul, George, and Ringo, in that order. (At first it was more like Allen Sherman put it, "Ringo is the one with the drums; the others all play with him," but fairly quickly it was John, Paul, George and Ringo.) The little brother of a friend of mine, just learning to talk, quickly learned the litany in the form "John Paul George n Oingr." There was, however, actually a backstory on the Beatles that most of us didn't know, and some of us--me for one--didn't care about.
The original group--The Quarry Men--had been founded by John Lennon (the John of the formula), along with people like Pete Shotton, Colin Hanton, and Eric Griffiths. A buddy named Ivan Vaughn introduced Paul McCartney (the Paul of the list) to John, and Paul eventually brought in a young friend of his named George Harrison (George of the list). Now they weren't the Beatles yet, but at least a sort of argument can be made for the canonical order--John, Paul, and George.
Next, however, came Stu Sutcliffe, an art-school classmate of Lennon's, who couldn't play bass, but had the money to buy one. Sutcliffe is one of the many Fifth Beatles we've heard of, but in point of fact he was more like the fourth, given that there was no regular drummer for the group yet. He was one of the original Beatles, however, in that the group acquired its name during his tenure with the band. The fifth Beatle then would be--all together now--Pete Best.
Pete Best brought with him a fellow named Neil Aspinall--another Fifth Beatle--who drove the band about and made necessary arrangements. He was never a member of the band per se, but he was part of the ensemble, and a very necessary part at that. Along with Mal Evans--a fan who first saw the Beatles perform at the now-legendary Cavern Club--he took care of the Beatles needs long after the band stopped touring. Eventually he became the head of Apple Corps., the Beatles' own record label.
One odd note that crosses my mind--I don't know that I've ever heard Mal Evans called the Fifth Beatle, or the Sixth Beatle, or anything like it, though he was as much a part of the group as anybody else. However--
Next we have their manager, Brian Epstein, who discovered the band while trying to run down a copy of a record they had made backing Tony Sheridan (who although he appeared on their earliest record, has never been a Fifth Beatle as far as I know). Brian Epstein has been described as a Fifth Beatle, which I suppose makes a sort of sense, though he was never really one of the group. He managed them, but he didn't necessarily hang out with them. And then came George Martin, who in a musical sense might be said to be the Fifth Beatle. He produced them, made arrangements for them, played piano (in studio) for them, and in the end even oversaw their musical legacy.
So what about Ringo Starr (the Ringo of the litany)? He's the Fourth Beatle, and yet he only comes in after many of the Fifth Beatles so far enumerated. It's been fashionable to denigrate Ringo Starr as the least talented member of the team--maybe not even the most talented drummer in the Beatles--and yet it's worth remembering that in the early days Ringo was the one everybody remembered. Even the Queen thought he was the Original Beatle (rather than the last to join). I think it was Paul McCartney who observed that it wasn't till Ringo joined the band that things really started to happen for them.
Another candidate for the position of course was disk-jockey Murray the K, who proclaimed himself the Fifth Beatle, but is hard to take seriously. After all, he was far more peripheral in the story than even Alistair Taylor, who to the best of my knowledge no one has ever called the Fifth Beatle.
So what has become of these various Fifth Beatles? Stu Sutcliffe exited first, dying of brain hemorrhage (possibly from a kick to the head) before the Beatles had become truly famous. If he thought he'd be remembered I imagine it would be as an artist, not as a bass-player. Brian Epstein, their manager, died of an accidental drug overdose a few years later. Mal Evans was shot in Los Angeles by the police in 1976 and Murray the K died of cancer in 1982. Pete Best and George Martin are still with us, but now Neil Aspinall has passed on. He joins John Lennon (First Beatle?, murdered 1980) and George Harrison (Third Beatle?, died of cancer 2001) in that Great Dance Hall in the Sky.
I've amused myself by staggering about the internets, butterfly net in hand, trying to get some sense out of this whole University of California lawsuit thing. A fascinating comment-thread from 2006 turned up here, in which some poor guy signing himself Larry Fafarman gets baited and repeatedly ripped apart by "Mary", "Albatrossity", "Flex", and "Josh", among others. Like a bull in a bullfight Larry gets up again and again and charges the cape, only to miss the mark altogether and go crashing once again into walls of the arena. He is sure that the University of California has discriminated against this Christian school somehow, but he hasn't read the court documents or anything like that. He is quite positive that most biologists have no need for evolutionary theory in their work, but he has no data to support his claim. He gets enraged when asked to provide evidence, and positively asserts that other people who have actually checked out the material must be wrong. Ex cathedra, I guess. I actually started feeling sorry for the guy after a bit, despite his, uh, bullheadedness, he was so badly outgunned in the discussion.
One of Fafarman's repeated points is that "The UC officials did not say that the science itself was bad. If UC wants to win this lawsuit, I think that UC needs to find more fault with the books than that. The main issue here is whether the books may add a religious viewpoint to the standard curriculum." Even though he was corrected several times on this point, he kept on asserting it, as though it were a fact. But it isn't. It's one of the points in contention. The University of Californian says it rejected the Bob Jones University biology textbook because it did not cover the standard course material. At no point did the university claim that it had any objection to an added religious viewpoint. That is what the lawyer for the Christian school is contending. The main issue here is not "whether the books may add a religious viewpoint to the standard curriculum"; if it were, then both sides would be in agreement on this point, since UC has never contested that concept. One of the material issues to be settled, it seems to me, is whether the books in question did in fact cover the standard curriculum, since UC says they didn't and the Christian school says they did. To me that appears to be a no-brainer, at least as far as the Bob Jones biology book is concerned. I don't know what exactly it was teaching, but whatever it was, it was anti-science, not science.
Of the three courses for which documents were given in the complaint the matter seems fairly open and shut for the government course and the English course. These two on their face appear to flunk the a-g standards UC has in place. This is not a matter of religious content; it is a matter of poorly designed courses. The Christian influence on American History course is another matter. UC rejected it as too narrow or too specialized, and that could be open to interpretation. It seems to me that it should have been placed in the (g) category (college prep elective) rather than the (a) category (history), both because of its somewhat specialized focus and because American History was a required prerequisite, and this course hardly qualifies as the required year of non-American history.
And while the UC judged the textbook inadequate for general American history, it's worth noting that here its intended use was for a Christian influence on America course. It's possible that a case could be made for it, though its attributing events to divine providence rather than investigating human causes seems problematical. That's not exactly history as we know it, but rather some kind of theology. It would be better to use a more orthodox treatment as the main textbook, and to use the Bob Jones book as a supplement, if it had to be used at all. But of course I'd have to see the book itself before I could pronounce on it; right now I'm taking the word of experts about what the book says.
In a previous piece I commented on the gall displayed by certain Christian parents who have demanded that the University of California relax its standards to admit children who did not qualify for admission due to their ignorance of elements of history and science that their parents had deemed inappropriate for them to learn. A federal court has now handed down its decision on the subject, and matters have gone entirely in favor of the University of California.
The University of California has rather stringent entrance requirements, probably because they have considerably more applicants than positions available. Oversimplifying radically the University of California requires:
These are known as the a-g requirements, and "are intended to ensure that students coming to the University are conversant with accepted educational and scientific content and methods of inquiry at the level required for UC students and typically expected of educated citizens in the competitive workforce." (PDF source) Students may show that they have in fact completed the requirements in several ways. The easiest is by having taken approved courses in high school. If their high school lacks approved courses students may still be admitted by taking courses in the missing subjects at community college or by passing standardized tests.
The University of California certifies college prep classes in both public and private schools. "For a course to be approved as an a-g course, the school must submit a request with the course curriculum, textbook information, and other supplemental materials to the University for approval." The UC website gives examples of courses that were and were not approved along with the reasons. There was an English course (Publishing on the World Wide Web or something like that) that didn't concentrate enough on writing, for example. A virology class whose data was nothing more than a list of diseases. And so on.
Okay now, the Calvary Chapel Christian School submitted a number of courses for a-g approval, and forty-three of them were accepted. A tiny handful were rejected. One English course (Christianity and Morality in American Literature) used only excerpts rather than entire works (see b above). One biology course used an anti-scientific book from Bob Jones University as its primary text (the preface actually admits to giving science a subordinate place in its presentation). Others apparently used similarly defective volumes as their sole or primary textbooks. According to the University of California those same courses would probably have been approved if the substandard volumes had been used as supplementary texts instead.
Christianity's Influence on America would "evaluate the direct relationship between organized Christianity and the ideas about government, society, and culture that came from it," "investigate the movements and forces that developed in response to Christian beliefs," and "discover in depth the Judeo-Christian beliefs and traditions of America". The course outline runs from "Founding of a Nation: Roots in the Reformation" to "New Millennium: ... Post-modernism". Only two texts are used: United States History for Christian Schools and Pilgrims in Their Own Land: 500 Years of Religion in America, though there is a vague reference to "Various primary materials and topic specific handouts." The course was rejected because its focus was too narrow and "The content of the course outline submitted for approval is not consistent with the empirical historical knowledge generally accepted in the collegiate community." The primary text used in the course was assessed as inadequate in its coverage of major components of United States History (it preferred to attribute "historical events to divine providence rather than [to analyze] human action" for one thing) and didn't encourage "historical thinking skills and analytical thinking" (the quotations are from Professors James Given and Gary Nash respectively).
Christianity and Morality in American Literature is a real mess. The description claims it "is an intensive study in textual criticism aimed at elevating the ability of students to engage literary works at the level of the author's beliefs and to examine and effectively communicate the impact of those beliefs on the work and the writing process." I don't believe the author of this passage has a clue about what textual criticism is; it is certainly the wrong approach to examining either an author's beliefs or the impact of those beliefs on his work. "Students will first survey the various prominent forms of American literature...." "The final project will consist of the examination of a significant piece of fiction from an approved list, and an intensive writing (term paper) identifying those processes and themes which inform it." (The approved list contains only two works by American authors--"Something Wicked This Way comes" by Ray Bradbury, and "A Canticle for Leibowitz" by Walter M. Miller. The rest are by British authors--Jane Austen, Chaucer, Tolkein, Bunyan, C. S. Lewis, Bram Stoker, and one French author, Victor Hugo.) The only text used is American Literature: Classics for Christians, which consists entirely of excerpts, "fails to provide substantial readings and ... insists on specific interpretations." (The quotation is from Professor Samuel Otter.) "Such a combination contradicts the emphasis on analytical and critical thinking required..."
The Special Providence: Christianity & the American Republic description starts out unpropitiously with a bogus James Madison quotation about the ten commandments and goes on to outline the familiar Christian America fantasy. The text for the course is a Bob Jones University Press publication, American Government for Christian Schools, about which Professor Mark Petracca said it contains "many factual and empirical assertions that are not generally accepted among political scientists [or] historians and that are nevertheless not substantiated within the text by evidence." The course was rejected as "not consistent with ... empirical historical knowledge" and for having an inadequate textbook.
Rather than make any effort towards actually improving their courses, the Calvary Chapel Christian School, along with the Association of Christian Schools International and a handful of students, sued the University of California, claiming religious discrimination. Specifically they deny that the courses are in any way inadequate, but rather insist that they teach the standard material plus a Christian perspective. The only possible reason for the courses' rejection, they claim, is that very Christian perspective. The facts obviously suggest otherwise.
Let me quote Mike Dunford of The Questionable Authority here:
When it comes to the biology courses, their claim that they are teaching the "standard material" with a religious viewpoint added had better be disputed - because they're not. I've got a copy of the Bob Jones University textbook that's used by some of the Christian schools. Biology for Christian Schools does not, in any way, shape, or form teach "standard" biology with religion added. It teaches religion instead of standard biology, and the University of California is absolutely right to refuse to accept courses taught from this book as biology classes.From the course description I'd have to say that the same is true of the government course, Special Providence: Christianity and the American Republic; this is not standard material, but rather religion disguised as a history of American government. God knows what they're teaching in the English course, Christianity and Morality in American Literature; the course description is so poorly written as to defy interpretation, and on that ground alone the University of California would have been within its rights in not certifying it.
Christianity's Influence on America is harder to evaluate, but I personally find it hard to disagree with the assessment that it is too narrowly conceived to qualify for UC's a-g standards. The lawsuit contends that much more narrowly conceived classes have made it, but they don't given any example that obviously qualifies. Instead they cite courses in Russian History, or the History of India, as being more narrow and specialized than Christianity's influence on America. There I can't help but wonder what world they're living in. Histories of entire nations--nations I may add that are older and more diverse than the United States--are obviously more general than a history of one religion's influence on a single nation. I can't imagine where they left their brains on that one. They don't give a single parallel example, such as (say) Masonry's Influence on America, or (say) Islam's influence on Indonesia. Instead we get Mexican History. Gack.
The basic point they're pushing is that the University of California is engaging in something they call "content discrimination". I would certainly hope so. That's precisely the point of examining courses and textbooks and so on. The University ought to discriminate between reliable, accurate content that reflects the actual state of knowledge, and unreliable, inaccurate content that doesn't. If they fail in this basic task, then they're not doing their job.
Both sides in the case demanded at least partial summary judgment. The Christian school claimed that there are no material facts to be decided, that the UC policy is unconstitutional on its face, and therefore the case should be decided in its favor without going to trial. UC on the other hand insisted that as there were material facts to be decided the case should go to trial, but wanted summary judgment on the issue of the constitutionality of their policy. The result was a clean sweep for UC. The judge ruled that UC's policy was constitutional (summary judgment in favor of UC) but that there were material facts to be decided about the application of the policy in the particular classes (no summary judgment in favor of either side, as UC requested). And there the matter stands.
The story at Inside Higher Ed called forth some amusing reactions, one of them mine. "denise" wrote that she had had "an opportunity to look through a Bob Jones middle school level biology textbook several years ago; and ... one would have a hard time convincing me that the content is not more than adequate. I found it very rigorous and I have no doubt it supercedes what is offered in most public schools." (I think she meant to say that she had no doubt it surpasses what is offered in most public schools.) Despite having no examples of this to offer us, she is quite sure that UC is guilty of religious discrimination. She also is under the impression that UC denied admission to the complaining students; this is far from the case.
"Ben Thare" is "familiar with ACSI and [knows] that the schools that are accredited by ACSI are usually pretty rigorous." He attributes UC's refusal to recognize substandard courses to "hateful narrow-mindedness and intolerance".
"Albatrossity" steers readers to his review of the BJU biology "textbook" (link). It's definitely worth reading. "Here’s just a taste of the 'adequate' contents of this putative science textbook — 'If the conclusions contradict the Word of God, the conclusions are wrong, no matter how many scientific facts may appear to back them.'” "denise" insisted that the textbook was too adequate; "Albatrossity" responded: "When students are taught that observations and evidence and data can be IGNORED if they contradict the word of God, they are not being taught science."
And then "Ben" chimed in with the usual accusation that science involves just as much faith that there is no creator as religion does that there is. " All evidence pointing to the existence of a creator must be ignored by science, he says, though without suggesting what possible evidence pointing to a creator might be being ignored.
A little further on "denise" again displays her ignorance of the situation by writing "Would UC find it necessary to evaluate lesson plans and classroom objectives to make sure the instructors of these religious schools aren’t supplementing said textbook with creation supplementals and speakers that purposfully contradict the scientific philosophy of the approved book" The answer of course is no since the UC has no problem with such anti-scientific "supplements" so long as the course material is actually mastered.
And I guess I'll conclude this with a comment from "Beth" that really sums up the situation:
I applaud the judge. If a textbook that tells students “If conclusions contradict the Word of God, the conclusions are wrong, no matter how many scientific facts may appear to back them” doesn’t bother you, I hope for the sake of innocent people that you are not allowed on any jury. Using a textbook that tells students to reject evidence, even when there is lots of it, is anti-educational period, but particularly in a science class. The whole idea of science is that your conclusions must be based on evidence, on scientific facts.
The critic has the same interest in the works of Miss Delia Bacon, Mr. W. H. Smith, and Judge Holmes, as the physician has in morbid anatomy. He reads them, not so much for the light which they throw on the question of authorship, as for their interest as examples of wrong-headedness. It is not at all a matter of moment whether Bacon, Raleigh, or another be the favorite on whom the works are fathered, but it is instructive to discover by what plausible process the positive evidences of Shakespeare's authorship (scanty as they are) are put out of court.Clement Mansfield Ingleby
James Hanley at Uncommon Liberty writes:
And it's not that I would ban creationists from the public universities--I don't care if someone who believes in special creation teaches political philosophy, French literature, theater, art, exercise science, history, economics, etc. But not biology, because creationism isn't scientific.
Okay, maybe theater or economics--but history? Me, I wouldn't go there, since the philosophy of special creation is inherently anti-history in its formulation. History is based on hard evidence, not speculation made up out of whole cloth. Creationism, on the other hand, dismisses evidence that doesn't fit its bizarre world-view. Creationists, for example, don't buy into the (to their minds absurd) notion that human beings invented or discovered agriculture. Mankind was specially created to garden, and had agriculture forced upon him as a result of the Fall of Man. (I've had this argument before. More than once.) Hunting and gathering peoples aren't cultures that haven't taken up agriculture yet--they are cultures that have fallen from the natural state imposed by the creator. One of the historical consequences of this belief was the underestimate of the time it would take to transform hunters and gatherers to agriculturalists. Nineteenth century American policy dictated that native Americans convert instantly from a hunter-gatherer way of life--perceived as laziness--to one based on agriculture--perceived as godly industriousness. A utopian idealist named Meeker tried this notion out on the Utes in Colorado in the 1870s, and ended up dead as a result.
And this is one of the most basic facts of history. Creationists have strange notions about many other aspects of history--the development of language, the accomplishments of the Sumerians, the role of Babylon, the role of Egypt--in fact, they seem to have a distorted view of the entire history of the Near East. But what can you expect from a group that denies the validity of radio-carbon dating, of dendrochronology, and yet believes in a recent global flood? These guys aren't playing the game of History any more than they are playing the game of Science, and have no business getting into the ring, or even suiting up for it.
Given this, it's not surprising that Creationists tend to jump onto other popular historical bandwagons for which evidence is lacking--the Christian America myth for example, currently being enshrined in HR888, the Inflate Religious Pretensions Act. I've already mentioned Flood Geology, of course, but there are also Eurocentricism, the denigration of Islam, the conspiracy notions behind modern Asian history, and so on and so forth--none of which may be inherent in Creationism--but once you've agreed to voluntarily blind yourself in one area, it's easy to extend it to others. If your eye offends you, pluck it out and all that, I suppose. Of course you won't be able to see where you're going, and if you lead others you're both going to end up in a pit, but that's a small price to pay for being doctrinally correct.
Now I'm speaking here of YECs, of course--Young Earth Creationists, for those who aren't hip to the current lingo. It really ought to be YUCs--Young Universe Creationists--but for some reason that hasn't caught on. Old Universe Creationists are another matter. Some of them, anyway. I used to watch a cable-access show by an Old Universe Creationist--from his comments I believe he was an astronomer by trade--and on the whole I'd have confidence in his ability to teach astronomy at any rate. I don't know about French Literature or exercise science, but I'd have more confidence in his ability to teach them than in the average YUC's ability to teach anything whatsoever that depended upon his ability to evaluate evidence accurately. Sloppy thinking in one field carries over to another--or at least I'd have trouble believing that it doesn't. Intellectual laziness in evaluating the evidence of astronomy, biology, geology, and history--all of which are key to being a card-carrying YUC--do not suggest a likelihood for intellectual rigor in political philosophy or economics. And willful blindness in one field easily carries over to another.
As for the Gonzales issue, well, anybody who thinks that denial of tenure is persecution is living in a fantasy world. Sorry, but denial of tenure is a fact of life in academia. Most of the time the reasons boil down to cold hard cash. An institution has to think long and hard before making the long-term commitment that tenure implies. My sympathies tend to be with the instructors in these cases, not surprisingly since my mother and step-father were both professors in institutions of higher learning. In Gonzalez's case my sympathy is somewhat muted by the fact that he appears to have been spending too much time on outside interests instead of keeping his eye on the ball. The guy was working in a highly competitive field, and if he wasn't bringing in the bacon, so to speak, then I'm not surprised his employer chose to let him go. Them are the breaks. As Superchicken used to observe, "You knew the job was dangerous when you took it, Fred." If denial of tenure is persecution, then I've known a lot of victims, and many of them much more obviously qualified in their fields than Gonzalez appeared to be in his.
[By the way, James Hanley's original post on the Gonzalez nonsense seems to me to put things in the right perspective. Denial of tenure is never fun; it would be lovely if every instructor in the world could find a permanent teaching position. But the dishonest campaign being run on his behalf is beneath contempt.]
One of my favorite animals is the aardvark, the amazing African digging machine that eats termites and appears to be unrelated to any other mammal on the face of the earth. When I last looked, anyway, the aardvark stood alone--a single species occupying a single genus in the sole family of its order. Only when we reached its class (it is a mammal after all, and a placental at that) did it have the company of fellows. It is not at all related to other similar-looking animals with much the same lifestyle--the giant anteater, say, or the pangolin--but walks alone among mammals.
The Dutch named it aardvark--aarde being a cognate of our own earth, and varken (I suppose) somehow related to the Indo-European porko, whence comes Latin porcus and English pork. Or maybe it's some Dutch abomination unrelated to anything elsewhere. I could look it up, I guess, but that would mean getting out of my chair and wandering around the cold house looking for reference works probably buried in the basement.
In any case the Dutch settlers named the beast an earth pig, aardvark in their defective tongue, and English borrowed it from the Dutch. Why they thought the thing was a pig I don't know. I remember some writer who described the four pigs of Africa, including the aardvark among more conventional suidae, but it never made any sense to me. Tell me, does that thing look like a pig? The earth part I've got no quarrel with, seeing that the creature out-burrows strong men with shovels, but it seems to me that you might as well call it an earth-cow, or an earth-goat, as an earth-pig.
Of course we've always had problems with pigs in English. When they're out in the pens, on the hoof as it were, they're plain old pigs, a good old Anglo-Saxon word of unknown derivation. Or swine, another good Anglo-Saxon word, this one going back through Old English to Proto-Indo-European *suino maybe, or something like that. After we've slaughtered them and delivered their roasted flesh to the table, they've turned into pork, from the Old French porc, and ultimately back to Latin porcus and Proto-Indo-European *porko. Or maybe they've turned into bacon, another Old French word I'm pretty sure, though I don't remember what it means. When we call them, however, for some reason we call them in Latin. Sui, sui, we say, and I guess they come.
Earth is a more straightforward proposition. Synonyms include dirt, ground, soil, mud, filth maybe. If we were looking for a decent English approximation of the uncouth aardvark we could do worse than start there. Dirtpig, soilhog, and maybe when we bring it to the table we could call it mudpork. Claybacon. I'm not even going to try to figure out how we'd call one. Terrasui? My Latin sucks.
I started this post a couple of weeks ago, but for some reason it seemed appropriate to publish it today. Happy Groundhog Day!
The Jerusalem Post has an interesting story about a seal from the first temple period:
A stone seal bearing the name of one of the families who acted as servants in the First Temple and then returned to Jerusalem after being exiled to Babylonia has been uncovered in an archeological excavation in Jerusalem's City of David, a prominent Israeli archeologist said Wednesday.
The 2,500-year-old black stone seal, which has the name "Temech" engraved on it, was found earlier this week amid stratified debris in the excavation under way just outside the Old City walls near the Dung Gate, said archeologist Dr. Eilat Mazar, who is leading the dig.
According to the Book of Nehemiah, the Temech family were servants of the First Temple and were sent into exile to Babylon following its destruction by the Babylonians in 586 BCE.
The family was among those who later returned to Jerusalem, the Bible recounts.
For those whose Ancient Near Eastern history may be a bit rusty, let me say that the First Temple, according to the Bible (or rather according to the Deuteronomistic History contained among the biblical texts), was built around 1000 BCE under the legendary King Solomon and destroyed 586 BCE by the historical Chaldeans or Neo-Babylonians or whatever you want to call them. A new temple (the Second Temple) was later rebuilt under the Persians. The destruction of the temple at least rests on a solid historical footing (we have ancient records of the event); since it was destroyed somebody presumably had it built, and Solomon is the name that tradition supplies. Of course tradition tells us that Ronald Reagan ended the Cold War too, and the one tradition may well be no better than the other.
Stone seals were the rubber stamps of the ancient world; officials used them to impress their signature, so to speak, in clay, so authenticating something as emanating from their particular office. Like rubber stamps, they were engraved in reverse, so that the impression would read correctly. The Jerusalem Post article notes:
The seal of one of the members of the Temech family was discovered just dozens of meters away from the Opel area, where the servants of the Temple, or "Nethinim," lived in the time of Nehemiah, Mazar said.
"The seal of the Temech family gives us a direct connection between archeology and the biblical sources and serves as actual evidence of a family mentioned in the Bible," she said. "One cannot help being astonished by the credibility of the biblical source as seen by the archaeological find."
There is a small problem, however, with this identification. It only works if the text is read the wrong way around. The Baptist Press notes:
But as it turns out, Mazar was misreading the inscription. Because the seal is designed to make an impression, the letters are written in mirror-image form, similar to how the word "ambulance" is written on the front of such a vehicle.
Following critiques from scholars such as the ones associated with the Biblical Archeology Society, Mazar now acknowledges the letters should read Sh-l-m-t. (Hebrew had no vowels.) If that's the case, then scholars believe it could refer to Shelomith, a man mentioned in Ezra 8:10 who also returned from Babylon to Jerusalem, or to Shelomith, the daughter of Zerubbabel mentioned in 1 Chronicles 3:19.
So, apparently, whether read forward or backward this stone seal turns out to corroborate the Bible. Again as the Baptist Press observes (without irony as far as I can tell):
The archeological discovery is at least the second one in recent months to make a tie to an obscure Old Testament name and thus, conservative scholars say, affirm the Bible's reliability.
The other corroboration?
Last summer British Museum officials announced the discovery of a two-inch-wide cuneiform tablet that contains details of a financial transaction by a "Nabu-sharrussu-ukin," who is called in the tablet the "chief eunuch" of Babylon King Nebuchadnezzar. That's the same person mentioned in Jeremiah 39:3 -- although spelled differently in different translations -- as the chief officer of Nebuchadnezzar who was in Jerusalem when the Babylonians overtook the city around 587 B.C.
Go figure.
My mother left a message reminding me that today is Lewis Carroll's birthday. Rex Stout, John Lennon, Alexander Woollcott, James Thurber, and Martin Gardner are numbered among his admirers. Mark Twain once met him, describing him as the shyest adult male he had ever met except Joel Chandler Harris, the author of the Uncle Remus stories.
A photographer, inventor, mathematician, satirist, clergyman, and amateur philosopher, Lewis Carroll is best remembered as the author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and Through the Looking-Glass. The Hunting of the Snark (An agony in eight fits) is a favorite of mine; the Bellman reminds me of a great many leaders in my experience. "He had bought a large map representing the sea, without the least vestige of land: and the crew were much pleased when they found it to be a map they could all understand. 'What's the good of Mercator's North Poles and Equators, Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?' So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply 'They are merely conventional signs! Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes! But we've got our brave Captain to thank,' (so the crew would protest) 'that he's bought us the best--a perfect and absolute blank!' This was charming, no doubt; but they shortly found out that the Captain they trusted so well had only one notion for crossing the ocean, and that was to tingle his bell. He was thoughtful and grave--but the orders he gave were enough to bewilder a crew. When he cried 'Steer to starboard, but keep her head larboard!' what on earth was the helmsman to do?"
Lewis Carroll turned 176 today.
H[uckabee] doesn’t believe in evolution, which is like not believing in electricity. You have a constitutional right not to believe in it, but grab a live wire and you will still be eliminated from the gene pool.
In a recent post I expressed a certain befuddlement over a notion that there is some sort of progression from hypothesis to theory to law. Not being a scientist myself I could only fall back on what I learned back in my school days. While stumbling about the internets looking for something or other I fell upon a Scientific American piece by John Rennie that observed:
Many people learned in elementary school that a theory falls in the middle of a hierarchy of certainty--above a mere hypothesis but below a law.
Somehow I missed that bit; I remember that stuff about forming hypotheses, testing them, and developing theories from hypotheses that panned out--whether that came up in elementary or junior high school I no longer recall--but nothing about theories being between hypotheses and laws. If it ever came up in school I must have spaced it out completely, because that whole idea was absolutely new to me when I read it in a critique of a biology textbook, complaining that the author should have written of Newton's "Law" of gravitation rather than "Theory" of gravitation. John Rennie goes on to confirm what I thought I understood:
Scientists do not use the terms that way, however. According to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), a scientific theory is "a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world that can incorporate facts, laws, inferences, and tested hypotheses." No amount of validation changes a theory into a law, which is a descriptive generalization about nature. So when scientists talk about the theory of evolution--or the atomic theory or the theory of relativity, for that matter--they are not expressing reservations about its truth.
The rest of the commentary on this point was also interesting:
In addition to the theory of evolution, meaning the idea of descent with modification, one may also speak of the fact of evolution. The NAS defines a fact as "an observation that has been repeatedly confirmed and for all practical purposes is accepted as 'true.'" The fossil record and abundant other evidence testify that organisms have evolved through time. Although no one observed those transformations, the indirect evidence is clear, unambiguous and compelling.
All sciences frequently rely on indirect evidence. Physicists cannot see subatomic particles directly, for instance, so they verify their existence by watching for telltale tracks that the particles leave in cloud chambers. The absence of direct observation does not make physicists' conclusions less certain.
Nice to have a little common sense for a change. I've probably been reading too much of this creationist/ID stuff for too long.
One of the things that irritate me--and there are many--is the way certain people seem to think that they are privileged to do things to others that would annoy the hell out of them if the situation were the other way around. Like distributing bibles at school, for example. People who would be horrified if their little angel came home from school carrying her brand new Koran or The God Delusion under her arm claim to see no problem with sending other people's kids home with a Gideon Bible. "But it's THE BIBLE," they exclaim, with much arm-waving and gesticulation, as though that somehow made things better. Maybe so, but remember, it's somebody else's Necromonicon, and their horror is no different from your horror.
Not that I have a lot of sympathy with people who want to be protected from running into ideas they may find uncomfortable. There are lots of them out there, and one way or another we all have to develop thick hides to protect us from somebody else's notions of reality.
But there are many times when a little peace and quiet are appropriate, and as a bus rider myself, I feel strongly that people should be prepared to shut up rather than disturb other passengers. This especially applies to people who seem to think that it is appropriate to read from their chosen text, whether it be from the Bible or from a syndicated advice columnist, in a loud carrying tone, just in case there are people at the other end of the bus who can't hear it.
Which brings me to this story: A Fort Worth woman is claiming religious discrimination because she was asked not to read to her children from her Bible in a loud voice while riding the bus. When she refused to desist a supervisor came and escorted her off the bus, then drove her and her children to their church, allowing her to read on the trip as loudly as she liked. This woman is now demanding an apology. "She said in her mind, what happened this past weekend was religious persecution, and she refuses to go along for the ride." Her representative, a person from the Liberty Legal Institute, proclaims:
I'm extremely shocked that a bus driver would pull over and take time out of his busy schedule in order to kick off a lady and her two kids while they're trying to read the Bible on their way to church.... They should be ashamed of that.
Richard L. Ruddell, president of the bus company, however, sets the matter straight:
It was not what she was reading, it was the very loud and disruptive volume. She was asked to lower her voice, but refused. Other passengers on the bus were looking to the driver for proper enforcement of the rules.
This driver acted in a very courteous and professional manner to properly deal with the situation. The T, as a public transit authority, has no policy against reading any type of material on the bus. Only when behavior of a passenger reaches an extreme volume, such as in this case, is a supervisor called.
On this same excursion into Internetland I turned up this story:
BEIJING - A Chinese Christian businessman has been released from detention after police grabbed him from his home in the early morning hours over a month ago, says his wife. Zhang Jing said her husband, 37-year-old Shi Weihan, was set free on January 4 after being held in a cell for 37 days, the legal limit in China before formal charges have to be filed. He was arrested on November 28, while his two young daughters cowered in their bedroom, for "illegally" publishing Bibles and Christian literature for distribution in home churches. His family had been worried he would be sentenced to at least five years.
Now that sounds more like persecution to me.
According to the New York Times, John T. Doolittle, who along with fellow-travelers Richard Pombo and Tom Delay did so much to gut environmental laws for the benefit of private corporations, is planning to step down.
WASHINGTON — Representative John T. Doolittle, a California Republican who has suggested he is almost certain to face criminal charges in a Congressional lobbying scandal, announced Thursday that he would retire from the House next year.
The announcement by Mr. Doolittle, 57, who is in his ninth term in Congress and was once seen as a rising star in the Republican Party, made no reference to the criminal investigation by the Justice Department, which has centered on his connections to the corrupt lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
Last April, Mr. Doolittle’s home in suburban Virginia was raided by the Federal Bureau of Investigation as part of that inquiry, and his wife, a campaign fund-raiser, was subpoenaed for her financial records.
The aptly-named Doolittle spent his time in Congress attempting to destroy the endangered species act and to make sure that nothing was accomplished on virtually any environmental front. Given this record it is no surprise that the California Republican had ties to corrupt lobbyists. The Times added:
Justice Department officials would not comment Thursday on the status of the criminal investigation against Mr. Doolittle, who is among nearly 20 House Republicans to announce that they will voluntarily leave Congress over the next year. Prosecutors appear to be focused on business connections between Mr. Doolittle’s wife and lobbyists, including Mr. Abramoff, who might have sought to influence his vote.
...Until this week, Mr. Doolittle publicly rebuffed calls for his resignation and said he was eager to seek another term. Branding his critics within the Republican Party as “weasels,” he continued until several days ago to seek donations for a re-election campaign this November.
I wonder what happened to change his mind.
