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Saturday, October 23, 2004

 

Rodin's Lutheran thinker.  He wrote about it himself, so it's no secret that Martin Luther spent many contemplative hours in his lavatory. I first encountered Luther's constipation in an undergraduate history seminar at the University of South Florida, where my professor argued passionately that Luther's 95 theses were really a product of his frequent struggles with Satan, who would visibly appear to the Wittenberg monk during his most serious bouts with constipation. Archaeologists now think they've uncovered the very lavatory "where Martin Luther launched the Reformation of the Christian church in the 16th Century."[1]

Coincident with this unusual find is the release of a feature article this week in Time Magazine. Built around molecular biologist Dean Hamer's new book The God Gene: How Faith Is Hardwired into Our Genes (Doubleday, 2004), the article ("Is God in Our Genes?") meanders through the speculative consequences of Hamer's thesis that spirituality is a human trait that can be traced to a piece of DNA on our genome. Hamer says: "I'm a believer that every thought we think and every feeling we feel is the result of activity in the brain."[2]  Very much like Antonio Damasio, whose book Descartes' Error (Grosset/Putnam, 1994) argued for practical emotion's etiology within the basal ganglia, Hamer wants to trace human spirituality to its genetic roots; unlike Damasio, he doesn't go so far as to say that we can frame any decisive conclusions regarding the cognitive content of what issues from nervous activity within us. Wisely, Hamer is agnostic on the question of God's existence. He says: "If there's a God, there's a God. Just knowing what brain chemicals are involved in acknowledging that is not going to change the fact."

So what's this got to do with Luther's toilet? It's all about avoiding the genetic fallacy. It is one thing to explain a human activity in terms of a natural law, but it is another thing entirely to say that truth values are thereby decided by virtue of that explanation. And it is not merely the factual matter of God's existence that is at stake here, for the attempt to extend natural science's powerful explanatory machinery to make real epistemic appraisals would effectively call into question anything that can be thought.

1. BBC News, Friday, October 22, 2004.
2. "Is God in Our Genes?" Time Magazine, October 25, 2004, p. 65.

posted by Merle Harton, Jr. 11:13 AM


Thursday, October 21, 2004

 

This will chill you.  On October 14, three teachers attended a Bush rally near Medford, Oregon, where they teach.  They had heard on NPR that the Bush campaign was stifling First Amendment rights, so they fastened on a clever plan that would allow them to see their president and also, in a benign manner, to call attention to the importance of American civil liberties—liberties such as free speech. They got tickets to the rally and showed up wearing T-shirts with the words, "Protect Our Civil Liberties." They were allowed in, but not without difficulty. As the rally got underway, they were eventually ejected from the Jackson County Fairgrounds and threatened with arrest. The problem? Their T-shirts.

Read the story here in The Progressive.

posted by Merle Harton, Jr. 5:07 PM


Wednesday, October 20, 2004

 

This just in: Hamid Karzai beats out Howdy Doody as new elected Afghan President .... As we watch the burlesque of voting in Afghanistan and prepare for a similar party-down in Iraq, nothing is going to dazzle us more than the chaos awaiting us here after the 2004 US presidential election—more insults, more suspicions, missing voting records, ineligible ballots, disenfranchised voters, accusations of a stolen election. And you thought the 2000 election was a kind of shock and awe.  Perhaps the real shock and awe will be how quickly the election ends, with the bitter result of more bad leadership.

There are now real tensions, serious tensions, in Christians circles as the machinery of democracy begins to lurch forward like a Juggernaut. On the one side are those, like the Voice of the Martyrs, who consider the ability to vote a privilege from God and encourage the faithful to let the voice of Christians in America be heard in this important election. On the other side are radical Christians who espouse a more traditional example of citizen behavior, looking to the ancestral model of Christian dissent as they encourage Christians in America to lay down their ballots. This is the point of the movement RESIST 2004. In an effort to challenge American Christians to forego voting, Doulos Christou Press is even offering free copies of its radical pamphlet "Voting: The Noble Lie" (by Andy Baker and Tristin Hassell), which reaches at least as far back as Origen to articulate a contemporary statement of positive Christian dissent.

At lunch today, a spirited Irish-American coworker complained about the turbulent political climate which has thrust from its fast circulating hot air two candidates who seem so alike as to be indistinguishable from ugly Siamese twins, freshly divided but still displaying a family resemblance. As an American, a lover of democracy, she vowed that Nader was looking better and better to her as a candidate. And on the news this morning, before heading off to the college, I watched a couple who had chosen sides in what has now become the inevitable two-party race and bickered among themselves before a live television audience. And so it goes.

After I reflected on such things and took them to prayer, I came away from the exercise with a fresh insight into what our responsibility as American Christians ought not to be. It is this. It should not be a human reliance on ourselves as arbiters of choice for any civilian leadership. It should not be a human reliance on an electoral system that pulls us away from the Lordship of Christ, at the same time pushing us toward a cynical expectation of a perfect mortal ruler. It should not lead us into confusing in prayer what God desires for us and what, really, we want God to give us. It should not lead us to say that the lesser evil is somehow no longer an evil. It should not make us trade our yoke with Christ for a suspicion that, as individuals, we alone can choose our future. It should not take us from our Christian communities and lead us to say that we stand with a human being, for our stand should be with Christ. This, at least, is what our responsibility as American Christians ought not to be.

posted by Merle Harton, Jr. 10:30 PM


Monday, October 18, 2004

 

In the November 2004 issue of The Progressive, Howard Zinn writes on what he calls "Our War on Terrorism," calling attention to the "war on terrorism" as logically incoherent.  After all, "Since war is itself the most extreme form of terrorism, a war on terrorism is profoundly self-contradictory." He therefore asks, "Is it strange, or normal, that no major political figure has pointed this out?" Here's the first paragraph of his article and a link to the rest:

I am calling it "our" war on terrorism because I want to distinguish it from Bush's war on terrorism, and from Sharon's, and from Putin's. What their wars have in common is that they are based on an enormous deception: persuading the people of their countries that you can deal with terrorism by war.  [ MORE ]

You can also find Zinn's article archived here.


posted by Merle Harton, Jr. 4:13 PM


Sunday, October 17, 2004

 

It's all about flip-flops, really.  The American Friends Service Committee has on its website a list of questions to ask candidates at political events.  Among the questions are those pertaining to:

And then there are the questions being considered by the Friends Committee on National Legislation:

Unfortunately, there isn't anything on either of the lists pertaining to a marriage amendment, to the displaying of the Ten Commandments on public property, to abortion or stem-cell research, so the AFSC lists are probably pretty much irrelevant to this year's presidential election.

posted by Merle Harton, Jr. 11:35 AM


© Merle Harton, Jr.  All rights reserved.  Biblical references are NIV® unless otherwise noted.

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