Some People Just Don't Like MacLeish

Earthrise

Joe Luna, the author of this article "Space | Poetry" (Critical Inquiry 43, no. 1 (Autumn 2016): 110-138), was one of the many who did not like MacLeish:

One of the most influential and widely reproduced commentaries on the image was written by Archibald MacLeish. The prose essay "A Reflection: Riders on Earth Together, Brothers in Eternal Cold" first appeared on Christmas Day, 1968 in the New York Times. It was quoted prominently in the special issue May 1969 National Geographic on Apollo 8, accompanied by a full-color centerfold reproduction of Earthrise. "To see the earth desireable as it truly is," concludes MacLeish,

small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold - brothers who know now they are truly brothers.[13]

Poetry was bound up in these events, not only as part of the hackneyed official propaganda by stooges like MacLeish, but also through the way in which contemporary media made the adventures discoverable and desirable in language.

[13.] Archibald MacLeish, "A Reflection: Riders on Earth Together, Brothers in Eternal Cold," New York Times, 25 Dec. 1968, p. 1. As Poole points out, the essay was in fact written and published before MacLeish could have seen the photograph to which it responds; see Poole, Earthrise, p. 35.

Luna had his reasons for disliking MacLeish. More on that another time . . .

Already Educated a Bit

Religion

Once upon a time, nearly two decades ago, I proofread and helped edit a book on "women and religion" for a friend who was working hard to make her mark in religious studies. There were a number of minor corrections that I made, as well as some matters of style that I adjusted, all of which she accepted. She had long realized that I was a better writer, and she didn't try to argue against my alterations.

But I then startled her by pointing to an important passage in her book and saying that she could strengthen her argument considerably by reworking the passage in a certain way.

She looked at me in surprise, dumbfounded for a moment, then said, "Well . . . I guess you learned something from my book."

My turn for surprise. I looked at her in silence, though I could have said, and maybe should have said, "Well, if I learned something from your book, then why did your book have to learn it from me?"

But we were still friends at that time, and I didn't want to embarrass her, though I now realize that I shouldn't have let her get away with that thought-theft.

She needed to know that I was already a fairly well-educated fellow before I met her, for she seemed remarkably oblivious to that fact.

Islamism is . . .

Radicalism

Islamism is not Islamic extremism;
rather, it is radicalism at the root of Islam.

Paradise Lost

Sun-Ae and I took a long walk yesterday in Gangneung, the city where some of the Winter Olympics took place, and here's a photo that she shot at my request:

Yes, those two are - reading from left to right -  Eve and Adam, and they serve as remainders of our fallen state, for the Korean title says "Paradise Lost" (1999). The artist is Oh Sang-il (오상일).

Vampire in my dream?

The Ghostly Host

Watching over us, indeed!

Rather, surveilling us!

I was thrashing about in a dream the other night, kicking out at an evil creature threatening me and my family, a ghost of some sort, a spectral vampire - and if I'm not mistaken, specifically, The Big Hominid, spiritual alter ego of Kevin Kim!

My wife shook me awake and asked, "What are you doing?"

"Well," I said, and I began to laugh, "I was fighting 'The Ghost of Kevin Kim.'"

My wife must have stared at me in the darkness, but she said nothing, and I fell back asleep, probably to again take on my heroic role as a good, glorious knight in quest of monsters to slay . . .

Ignorant Experts on False Islamism

Amazon Books

Martin Kramer directs us to an observation by a man genuinely knowledgeable on Islamism and strongly critical of false experts who speak without knowledge:

Graeme Wood (The Atlantic), in his new book [The Way of the Strangers: Encounters with the Islamic State] on ISIS: "In my conversations with [Western] scholars of Islam, few of the people who dismissed the Islamic State as a product of false Islamism - Jacobinism with an Islamic veneer - were able to name a single cleric or [Muslim] scholar associated with the Islamic State, or a fatwa or other statement by that [Muslim] scholar. The level of ignorance is as appalling as if a scholar of Marxism declared the Soviet Union 'not Marxist' and turned out to be unfamiliar with the name of Trotsky or Lenin." [The Way of the Strangers: Encounters with the Islamic State, page 76]

That means I know more than most so-called experts. Yet, I know that I know next to nothing about anything. By the end of the semester, however, I should know quite a bit more than next to nothing, since my Islamism course appears to have enough students to take place this time.

Egyptian TV host Hani Al-Nahhas Supports Assassination of Jordanian Writer Nahed Hattar,

Hani Al-Nahhas
Supports Murder of Nahed Hattar

We now have 'respectable' men supporting extrajudicial punishment for those who 'blaspheme.' Memri informs us in Clip No. 5697 (September 26, 2016) that:

Egyptian TV host Hani Al-Nahhas declared that he supported the assassination of Jordanian writer Nahed Hattar, who was due to have stood trial for blasphemy following his posting of a cartoon online. Al-Nahhas said that blasphemy does not constitute freedom of speech and that Hattar would stand trial in "God's court."

Al-Nahhas expressed his opinion live on the Egyptian Alhadas Elyoum TV. Click for the video, for the transcript, and for an article on the original offense.

Climate Change Expert Sheikh Abd Al-Majid Al-Zindani Against the World!

Climate Change
Memri

MEMRI TV Clip No. 5520 relays a warning from Yemeni cleric Sheikh Abd Al-Majid Al-Zindani to those of us living in the temperate zone:

I am going to speak about something that I know very well. Europe and the US are afraid. Their scientific institutes are speaking about this. I watched a film about bird migration. According to this film, there are birds that are now migrating from Europe to the Arab world from the United States and South America and from Russia to countries to the south. They say that this is a warning . . . . They say that this is the work of nature but who created these migrating birds? Who guided them where to migrate? They say that these birds are declaring that the countries will become uninhabitable in 15-20 years. Where will the peoples of these countries go? They will come to us and do you think they will ask for permissions?

I thought that the climate change we were supposed to be worrying about was global warming, but what the sheikh seems to be referring to is a new ice age headed our way.

Ah, which alarmists to trust . . .

No Muslim Prayers for Souls of Non-Muslims?

Belgian Imams
Smallmindedness?
Memri

According to a Memri transcription of Clip No. 5418, "Belgian Imams Refuse to Pray for Souls of Non-Muslim Victims of Brussels Attacks" (March 26, 2016). Apparently, to pray for non-Muslims is forbidden by Islamic law (sharia)! But the Council of Belgian Imams were somewhat flexible on this issue, as we see from the summary that Memri provided:

According to the UAE-based Al-Ghad Al-Arabi TV channel, the council of Belgian imams rejected a recent initiative to pray for the souls of the victims of the Brussels terror attacks on the grounds that praying for non-Muslims ran counter to Islamic law. In the report, which aired on March 26, Sheikh Abdelhadi Sewif, Chief Imam of the Great Mosque of Brussels, said that one could get around this by avoiding the word "prayer" and calling it a show of solidarity with the families.

As indicated, here are some excerpts provided by the Al-Ghad Al-Arabi TV channel:

Voice of reporter: Once again, Belgian mosques find themselves in the midst of a controversy, following an initiative by an official institution to hold a prayer for the souls of the victims of the Brussels attacks. This initiative was rejected by the council of imams, on the grounds that this runs counter to the Islamic shari'a,and that such a prayer can be held only for the souls of Muslims.

Sheikh Abdelhadi Sewif, imam of the Great Mosque of Brussels: We cannot pray over the souls of non-Muslims, but if we do this, we don't have to call it a prayer. We can call it something else: "solidarity with the families of the victims." We can stand by them and support them . . .

Imam Mohammad Ghali: There is disagreement about this among the scholars and the public. [Some] say that it is prohibited to pray for the souls of non-Muslims. But since this was a general event, in which Muslims as well as non-Muslims [were hurt], we address all of the victims, and wish them peace, mercy, and health.

This prohibition on prayers for non-Muslims is odd, for I know that many imams raise Christians and Jews up to Allah during Friday prayers. Oh, hold on. That's when radical Imams pray for Allah to curse Christians and Jews and destroy them.

But notice that the Imams got around the prohibition by not calling the ritual a "prayer."

If only Islamic law were ever so flexible . . .

James Wood on "the impossibility . . . of writing a great Christian novel"

James Wood
Photograph by Jared Leeds
The Guardian

On the blog of the liberal Catholic Commonweal website, Anthony Domestico has posted an entry titled "James Wood, Religion, and the Novel," in which he notes that Wood - in a recent Guardian interview with Peter Conrad, "Literary critic James Wood: 'I'm taking a religious view of an earthly form'" (April 8, 2015) - confesses to doubts about the possibility of a great Christian novel:

I can only think of bad Christian novels, like Graham Greene's. There are mystical novels - To the Lighthouse, Mrs Dalloway - and in The Brothers Karamazov you have something like the iconostasis in a Russian Orthodox cathedral: certain panels, like those about Father Zossima or the parable of the grand inquisitor, uphold the faith that Dostoevsky undermines elsewhere. Maybe Moby-Dick qualifies too, though at the cost of being undramatic or essayistic or poetic. Perhaps narrative is inherently secular. It corrugates things, bends them too much to stay religious, as Dostoevsky wisely feared. Among contemporaries, Marilynne Robinson comes closest in Gilead, which is about a Congregationalist pastor in Iowa who's dying - though she has to sacrifice a lot of the novel's innate comedy and dynamism on the altar of high thought. The novel is a comic form, because it's about our absurdities and failings. We’re told that Jesus wept, but never that he laughed.

As for today's Gypsy Scholar blogpost heading, which borrows Domestico's words to summarize Wood's position on the impossibility of "writing a great Christian novel," maybe there's truth to the view that writing a full-scale Christian novel isn't possible, but what about a great Christian novella? I humbly offer The Bottomless Bottle of Beer as exemplar.

Or am I once again just joking?

A Couple of Jokes . . .

Amazon Books

I'm reading my brother Shannon's new novel, The Lonely Void, and enjoying the story, but I'm only up to page 199 out of 518 total pages, so I'm not yet ready to comment. I can, however, post a brief dialogue between the protagonist Bob Gifford, an atheist, and his friend Father Pallo, a Catholic priest. Pallo is Latino, and Bob is Irish-American. They tell a couple of jokes, Bob going first:

"You hear the one about the Irish couple who got engaged?"

"Not sure."

"Seems the bride-to-be was carrying guilt for not having been totally honest about her past. She confessed to her fiancé that she had been a prostitute. 'Well, the wedding's off!' he snapped. 'But . . . my family was hungry and I only walked the streets to keep food on the table!' she cried. Then, the light went on in her fiancé's mind. 'Oh, a lady of the evening. Well, that's different,' he reassured her. 'For a moment there I thought you said you were a protestant!'"

"Very funny. Oh, and did you hear the one about the atheist who died and went to heaven?"

"No."

"Neither did I!"

Just a taste of some of the humor . . .

William Kilpatrick on Exempting Islam from Criticism

William Kilpatrick
Crisis Magazine

My friend Bill Vallicella posted on an article by William Kilpatrick about "Islam's Religious Exemption From Criticism" (Crisis Magazine, July 23, 2014), and since the article reflects some of my own thinking, I'm excerpting it here:

[The defense of Islam by non-Muslims] comes in the form of "vouchers" for Islam's good character: assurances by world leaders that Islam is a peaceful religion, assurances by religious leaders that it is a model of interfaith tolerance, and assurances by educators that "jihad" is an interior spiritual struggle . . . . Western critics of Islam often find themselves facing fines or even jail time. In most of Europe, you can safely wave a "Behead Those Who Insult Islam" poster in the face of a policeman, but if you are a non-Muslim and you observe that Islamic law allows for beheadings, you'll be standing before a magistrate the next day on hate crime charges . . . . One of the primary arguments . . . [in defense of] Islam is that it's a stabilizing force in the Middle East and elsewhere. But if that's not the case, should we still want Islam to succeed? If Islam is a destabilizing force, wouldn't the world be better off without it? And since Muslims are the primary victims of Islamic violence, wouldn't they also be better off without it? . . . Islam is looking more and more like a world-threatening ideology, but it is . . . immune to criticism . . . because it is a recognized and long-established religion. To challenge it is to court charges of anti-religious bigotry. In addition, something in our conscience makes us . . . . conditioned to have a favorable view of religion -- especially other people's religion . . . . [T]o contemplate Islam's failure ["somehow doesn't seem right"] . . . . [S]ome critics of Islam contend that it is nothing but a political ideology and ought to be labeled as such. But this rebranding effort is a difficult sell because, by most standard definitions of the term, Islam does qualify as a religion. To most people, moreover, it certainly looks like a religion . . . . [with] centuries-old observances . . . . When people prostrate themselves in prayer five times a day, . . . [a critic can hardly] make the case that what they're doing is nothing more than a power play . . . . [In fact,] Islam is a hybrid: it's both a political ideology and a religion . . . . [T]he religious side provides considerable protection from criticism. Because of its religious nature, it seems improper to engage Islam in . . . ideological warfare . . . . Yet the threat to the West and to the rest of the world is, by all appearances, increasing . . . . Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has proclaimed the creation of a new caliphate state, declared himself caliph, and has called on Muslims worldwide to join him in waging war against infidels . . . . [T]he idea of the caliphate is that there should be only one unified Islam . . . . [T]he caliphate is intended to be a borderless community -- a trans-national and ever-expanding empire of true believers . . . . Islam aspires to be a universal belief system . . . . Islam has the advantage of conducting its proselytizing activities under the banner of religion . . . . [But] Mosques are not just places of worship; they are often centers of political activity and, not infrequently, of jihad activity. As a popular Muslim poem puts it, "The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets, and the faithful our soldiers" . . . . Of course, for a non-Muslim to even hint at the possibility that mosques might serve such purposes is to invite accusations of Islamophobia and bigotry . . . . Which goes to prove the point: Islam's religious status puts it beyond criticism. You can criticize very radical Islamic radicals and very extreme Islamic extremists -- just as long as you add that, of course, their activities have nothing to do with the religion of Islam . . . . [T]he theology/ideology of Islam has some very large weak spots. But our sense of propriety, which is nowadays governed by the rules of political correctness, won't allow us to even talk about them. In effect, the sensitive areas are protected by a large sign that reads "religion -- do not touch."

I've long recognized Islam as both religious and political. That dual nature confuses modern people, who usually expect religion to stay in the private realm as a personal piety that doesn't seek to influence politics. Even in its own founding years -- or should I say especially in its founding years -- Islam was deeply involved in politics, as well as in war -- politics by other means, as Clausewitz observed.

In fact, I would argue that Islam -- in its synthesis of religion, politics, and war within an all-encompassing legal system for the total regulation of society -- is a throwback to one of the earliest forms of organized religion: a theonomic state in which the leader combined the roles of priest and king . . . and, of course, of military general.

True Message of All Religions is 'Peace'?

You Don't

Need Me

To Tell You!

Damian Thompson has an interesting article, "Religion is the new politics - but Britain's secular politicians just don't get it" (The Spectator, 28 June 2014), which he opens by noting Buddhist attacks on Muslims in Myanmar and the 'analysis' of this Buddhist violence in Time:

Here's the verdict of Time magazine: 'Every religion can be twisted into a destructive force poisoned by ideas that are antithetical to its foundations. Now it's Buddhism's turn.' There speaks the sorrowful voice of liberalism - still piously attached to the notion that the true message of all religions is 'peace'.

Clearly, any human institution can be distorted, and even turned toward violence - including such a peaceful religious institution as Buddhism - but to assume that the true message of every religion is peace entails an unacceptable ignorance on the part of journalists (as Thompson seems to imply), who are not adequately performing their role of informing us about religious beliefs.

An honest reading of the central texts of various religions shows that some religions are more susceptible to violence than others, though Mr. Thompson doesn't clearly make this point in this particular article.

Religion is not an ideology?

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.
Photograph by Matt Rourke
Associated Press
NYT

Matt Apuzzo, reporting for the New York Times, writes "U.S. to Expand Rules Limiting Use of Profiling by Federal Agents," (January 15, 2014):

The Justice Department will significantly expand its definition of racial profiling to prohibit federal agents from considering religion, national origin, gender and sexual orientation in their investigations . . . . The move addresses a decade of criticism from civil rights groups that say federal authorities have in particular singled out Muslims in counterterrorism investigations.

To the rational mind, this sounds so weird that I have to at least wonder if the report has been inadvertently edited in a way that conflates "profiling" with "racial profiling" -- except that I've too often seen the term "racist" itself deployed as an epithet against those who subject Islam to critical questioning (which perhaps has its intellectual origin in Edward Said's abusive use of the term "Orientalist"). I therefore find regrettably all too plausible this report that the Justice Department will expand its definition of race to include religion. (Not to mention gender and sexual orientation.) Wouldn't this mean, for example, that a Christian who converts to Islam is suddenly a different race? Perhaps the Justice Department labors under the arguably racist notion that all Muslims are Arabs?

Whatever else it might entail, a religion is an ideology, and whether one thinks Islamism is Islam pure and simple or Islam tainted and distorted, Islamism itself is a religion. Will the Justice Department refuse to consider Islamism as a factor in its investigations of terrorism?

Is the expression "religious terrorism" to be an oxymoron?

How to raise (mostly) novelists . . .

The King Clan
Photo by Bärbel Schmidt
The New York Times

In the photo above, moving clockwise from left to right, we find Joe Hill (i.e., Joe King), Tabitha King, Kelly Braffet, Owen King, Stephen King, Naomi King and Joe's dog, McMurtry. Naomi and McMurtry are the only non-novelists. Braffet is the sole literary outsider, having joined the clan by marrying Owen. Focusing on the offspring, we see that two of the three King children grew into writers. How did this come about? When they were growing up, the kids entertained their parents by reading to them, as we're told by Susan Dominus in "Stephen King's Family Business" (New York Times, July 31, 2013):

Entertaining their parents, for the King children, was part job, part enrichment. At bedtime, they were the ones expected to tell their parents stories, instead of the other way around. Whatever their methods or intentions, Stephen and Tabitha's shared vocation, and their approach to child rearing, has yielded a significant number of successful fiction writers in their household. Tabitha is an accomplished writer with eight novels to her credit, and two of their three children, Joe and Owen, are novelists. (Naomi is a Unitarian Universalist minister.) Joe's "NOS4A2," a sprawling mix of horror and fantasy that is his third critically praised best seller, was published last April; Owen's second work of fiction, a well-received comedic novel titled "Double Feature," was published in March. Owen, perhaps inevitably, married a writer, Kelly Braffet, whose third novel, a literary thriller called "Save Yourself," is out this month. And Stephen's much-anticipated sequel to the "The Shining," titled "Doctor Sleep," comes out this fall.

This method produced, perhaps inadvertently, two novelists out of three children. Why not Naomi? Why doesn't she tell stories? Well, she does:

"I have different stories, and those are the ones I tell. It's just a different genre." There are the stories she communicates to readers through her online ministry. There are also the stories she creates through sock monkeys costumed as adventuring pirates, whose exploits she creates and then documents on her Flickr account. "It's about play, and it's totally congruent with who I am as a religious leader," she said, "but that isn't what people have been taught to think." Like every other member of her family, she has stories in her life, and they sustain her.

This may sound weird, but telling stories is part of every ministry. I've never heard a good preacher who wasn't a good storyteller. An active imagination is apparently useful in religion, even (especially?) in prayer, as T. M. Luhrmann implies in "Addicted to Prayer" (New York Times, August 3, 2013):

Take Sigfried Gold, the subject of a recent article in The Washington Post. He's a thoughtful, articulate man who lives in Takoma Park, Md., and turned 50 yesterday. He is passionate about philosophy and long ago decided that there was no stuff in the universe that was not physical -- no supernatural, no divine . . . . [However,] he also smoked too much, and more than anything else he ate too much. He was worried that his weight -- a good 100 pounds of excess fat -- would kill him. So he joined a 12-step program to control his food addiction. One of the steps is to turn your problem over to a higher power. So Mr. Gold created a god he doesn't believe exists: a large African-American lesbian with an Afro that reached the edges of the universe . . . . Every day Mr. Gold dropped to his knees to pray, and every day he spent 30 minutes in meditative quiet time. These days Mr. Gold, who calls himself a "born-again atheist," doesn't smoke. He doesn't drink. And, at 5 feet 7 inches, he weighs 150 pounds.

Did he recount stories to himself? The "large African-American lesbian with an Afro . . . [reaching] the edges of the universe" sounds like part of a story to me. Of course, this goddess is merely Mr. Gold's anthropomorphization of the universe, but if he develops a personal relationship with this imaginary deity, a story would have to develop to frame that ongoing relationship and make sense of it.

Be that as it may, I now see that rather than reading to my children, which I did, and telling them stories, I ought to have had them reading to me!

They might then prefer books to smartphones . . .

Eternal Avatar Identity?

Mechanical Head of Dmitry Itskov?
Photo by Brandon Thibodeaux
The New York Times

In an unexpected article by by David Segal -- "This Man Is Not a Cyborg. Yet." -- for the New York Times (June 1, 2013), we learn that a Russian millionaire named Dmitry Itskov wants to pursue an odd project funded by his plentiful money (apparently associated with the so-called "technological singularity"):

His project, called the 2045 Initiative, for the year he hopes it is completed, envisions the mass production of lifelike, low-cost avatars that can be uploaded with the contents of a human brain, complete with all the particulars of consciousness and personality.

Why? Just for the hell of it? No:

This would be a digital copy of your mind in a nonbiological carrier, a version of a fully sentient person that could live for hundreds or thousands of years. Or longer. Mr. Itskov unabashedly drops the word "immortality" into conversation.

Okay, but why create this digital, possibly 'immortal' copy? In Itskov's words:

"I realized that I wouldn't be happy, just working and spending money. I would just age and then die. I thought there should be something deeper."

A digital copy is something deeper? Whatever the reply to that question, I still don't quite see the point. So what if my avatar can live 'forever'? It's not me, no more than a clone of me is me. A clone would be my twin, and a digital copy is not even that close. When I die, I die, and whatever happens happens.

Perhaps Itskov believes that consciousness is distinct and separable from the brain -- i.e., the mind as soul or spirit -- and carries one's true identity. If so, does he hope to transfer it from human brain to computer hardware? But why transfer it at all in that case? What if it doesn't want to be transferred? Why not let it go wherever it goes at death?

But if Itskov doesn't believe that consciousness is distinct from the brain, then it can't be transferred, merely copied, and the copy's not my consciousness, but rather the consciousness of my silicon-based 'clone,' what good does it do me?

Or am I simply confused about this stuff?

Lee Jae-min on Textual Interpretation

Korea Herald

Professor Lee Jae-min, of Hanyang University's School of Law, writes regularly for the Korea Herald, and his recent article, "Evolutionary text interpretation" (February 20, 2013), proved very interesting for me, though he was mainly referring to legal texts, which is not my expertise:

Once codified, texts are set in stone, but the world we live in continues to change. A critical question then is, should words in these texts be understood as they were agreed upon at the time of the signing or as they are accepted at present?

He offers a contemporary example:

Suppose legislation, enacted in 1990, contains the term "cellphone." Does it mean a cellphone that we knew as of 1990, a brick-sized portable phone, and its future extensions? Or should the term also cover the new electronic products, sporting "all-in-one" digital capabilities, that we carry in our pockets and bags in 2013? This question relates to what is called "evolutionary interpretation" or "dynamic interpretation" of texts, and poses a new challenge.

I was familiar with the concept, of course, but Professor Lee expresses himself exceptionally clearly, as below, where he considers one solution:

This phenomenon is almost inevitable. Even after the words are inscribed on pages and in texts, the world where they apply continues to change. So, a gap is always there. The trouble is, the pace of change continues to quicken -- sometimes to an astonishing degree in a very short time, which means the gap becomes wider and deeper. An amendment is always a possibility, but frequent amendment is neither easy nor feasible, particularly so when the text is a grand document such as a constitution or an important treaty.

Imagine how this applies to religious texts in our rapidly changing world. One can't generally even amend them. One is left with reinterpretation. But even that takes time and seriousness of mind. Meanwhile, the world moves on. I've noticed that the recent polls in America show a decline in religion. Are Americans headed down the European path? Is the reason a fast pace of change that makes religious texts seem ever less relevant?

And are Islamism's suicide bombers the death of Islam writ small as Muslims fail to reconcile Islam with a rapidly changing world?

Judgment Day for our Naive Hero . . .

Judgment Day

The Bottomless Bottle of Beer

Terrance Lindall

Terrance Lindall has all but finished the illustrations to go with my story, The Bottomless Bottle of Beer, for you see the panoramic courtroom scene above in which the articulate Beelzebub is making his point on the sanctity of law:

What, then, is law? It is the most basic foundation upon which is established the universal order of all things. Natural philosophers refer to laws of nature, moral philosophers to moral law, legal philosophers to human law, and each category of law stands worthy of reverence. Respect for the laws of nature serves as paradigm for respect towards other laws. Consider the heavens, which bow in reverence to the laws dictating the orderly motions that we discover above. Imagine the disorder were the heavenly bodies to flout their laws. No, rather, such chaos is unimaginable.

Beelzebub is partly lying, of course, for he and Satan's other minions rebelled against God's laws, as described in Milton's Paradise Lost, and the heavens no longer obey the original laws, for the planets themselves follow their erratic paths, from which they derive their name: "planets."

The astute reader will catch these points without their being pointed out, but despite his lies, Beelzebub speaks enough of the truth to sound persuasive, thereby giving our naive hero the legal sweats . . .

Robert Bellah's Critique of Sociobiology?

Bellah's Magnum Opus

Amazon

Although he mentions the word "sociobiology" only one time in 746 pages (page 261, to be specific), much of Bellah's book draws on paleontology and biology, both comparative and evolutionary, to refute sociobiological views by showing that culture extends far down the evolutionary tree and deep into evolutionary history, by which he implies the co-evolution of culture and biology, an antireductionist view in which each influences the other -- or so I thought the other night in an insomniac hour I lay upon my bed thinking about Bellah, his views, and his role as my adviser back when I was studying at Berkeley, with one thought leading to another, ending with this contra-sociobiological moment, which I might go into more deeply some day when I've finished reading the book.

Sorry to be so brief this morning, but I have final exams to administer and final papers to grade . . .

Eben Alexander's Proof of Heaven?

Proof of Heaven?

Amazon

Eben Alexander is a neurosurgeon who had an unexpected near-death experience that has convinced him of the afterlife, or what in Newsweek he calls "My Proof of Heaven" (October 15, 2012), the title of an article in which he describes his extremely vivid experiences undergone while lying unconscious in a coma for seven days, and not a near-death experience in just any coma:

I'm not the first person to have discovered evidence that consciousness exists beyond the body. Brief, wonderful glimpses of this realm are as old as human history. But as far as I know, no one before me has ever traveled to this dimension (a) while their cortex was completely shut down, and (b) while their body was under minute medical observation, as mine was for the full seven days of my coma.

He then expands upon this point:

All the chief arguments against near-death experiences suggest that these experiences are the results of minimal, transient, or partial malfunctioning of the cortex. My near-death experience, however, took place not while my cortex was malfunctioning, but while it was simply off. This is clear from the severity and duration of my meningitis, and from the global cortical involvement documented by CT scans and neurological examinations. According to current medical understanding of the brain and mind, there is absolutely no way that I could have experienced even a dim and limited consciousness during my time in the coma, much less the hyper-vivid and completely coherent odyssey I underwent.

It took me months to come to terms with what happened to me. Not just the medical impossibility that I had been conscious during my coma, but -- more importantly -- the things that happened during that time.

Dr. Alexander describes an intriguing experience, one worth reading about, but two things strike me from his words above, that he was "under minute medical observation" and "[a]ccording to current medical understanding of the brain and mind," no scientific theory exists to explain his experience, for these strong points that direct us to a mystery -- namely, how could his brain have generated such vivid mental activity that went unrecorded by the finest scientific instruments -- are also simultaneously weak points, for they depend on current medical technology, which is imperfect, and current science, which is incomplete, leaving open the possibility that this 'proof' is no better than what is called "the God of the gaps," an expression referring to the gaps in our techniques and our knowledge that are used by some as evidence for God's intervention in the world and thereby for God's existence.

In other words, Dr. Alexander is saying that because science and technology cannot currently account for his experience, then his experience must be real. Granted, it seemed real enough to convince him, and I can't exclude the possibility that a similar firsthand experience would convince me -- nor can I exclude the possibility that the book, with its "hyper-vivid and completely coherent odyssey," might convince me as well if I were to read it.

But I have to maintain a sensible skepticism, reflecting both creatively and critically . . .