Sunday, September 29, 2013
Saturday, September 28, 2013
Tips for writing a successful grant proposal
Written by Dr. Helen De Cruz primarily for professional philosophers, but I think it's relevant for proposals in other fields as well: here
Friday, September 27, 2013
Neil DeGrasse Tyson at 'Beyond Belief' Conference
On the parallel exuberance of science and religion
*Dove: substituting one farce for another
I've been meaning to comment on this for a while but stepped back to think about it some more. And now, quite a bit of time has passed but I think it still warrants some commentary. My thoughts are still incomplete on the matter, and I may be wrong in certain points of the campaign timeline, but I figured I'd try and write some of it out anyway.
(*I know this is a touchy topic, and bold still for a male to be writing on but...)
So Dove has, for some time now, made an active effort to create positive body images for women who don't fit the skinny model mold that is so often glamourized in magazines, tv, movies, and so on.
They've taken the initiative to focus and campaign on "real beauty" with an attempt to invigorate the discussion on what media does to the self-esteem and pressures placed on physical features of women that motivate the vanity fair we run in many societies today. As the ad the left states"the company made the decision to use real women" in hopes that this will boost their product and be more "real" with the people. The ad below considers the issue of self-perception and attempts to shed some light:
In this way, Dove has taken an active or rather open stance about their approach and the photoshopping techniques used to construct a fake image that the models themselves do not live up to:
There have been several documentaries that have attempted to shed further light on the detrimental effect media (television, movies, magazines, billboards, etc.) have had on the body image of women of all ages.A few examples are 'America the Beautiful', 'Killing us softly', 'Miss Representation', and many more. There is a blog (highly recommended) that also focuses on this issue, among other things, at sociological images.
Relatively recently, Dove Canada posted an ad about a trojan horse that targets photoshoppers and what they do to get pictures into a form that is advertisement-ready:
In this particular ad, the target audience are the photoshoppers who get paid to do what they do for advertising agencies and other companies. It's in fact, a very unrealistic attempt to "open the eyes" or "wake up" photoshoppers to a revolution and stand for the principle that what they are doing is "wrong"; as if the photoshoppers are going to stop what they do and leave their job on moral grounds. This, unless you work with a premise that photoshoppers do not have financial concerns, is blatantly absurd. Money as a method of sustaining a lifestyle is also one of the many primary reasons revolutions cannot be maintained. At one point or another, people need to return to the system and make money - pay bills, buy food, feed their children, etc. etc. Escaping the capitalistic cycle is tremendously difficult.
A friend of mine pointed out that Dove, unbeknownst to a male like myself with no particular interest in women's beauty products (whatever commentary that may warrant), is under the auspice of 'Unilever' that also carries brands such as 'Fair & Lovely' "that blatantly promote racism and skewed beauty ideals in India and other countries." The operations of such a company undermines the work that Dove does. However, as any major corporation with multiple brands, it doesn't strike me that the Unilever corporation itself is concerned with women's issues or contradicting campaigns by their brands. The liberal market is about one thing: profit. Much like the satirical comment written by Oliver Stone for Gordon Gecko in the movie 'Wall Street': "Greed is good". This insulates the market, the U.S. market and those that take it as their model, from any moral accountability as long as it makes money. This is a systemic concern about the economy, the market, and how it operates, which warrants another critique that many with much bigger status and intelligence capital than I, have concerned themselves with - Zizek, Badiou, Sandel, etc.
What I would like to bring out is some of the absurdity with Dove's campaign on "real beauty", which they justify with using "real women" in their advertisements.
(this ad is particularly weird, as if 'real women' are only 'white women' but anyway...)
This campaign of 'real women', 'love your body', 'inner beauty' (all very nice mantras) seems to cross with another campaign that has in a way glorified bigger women, the plus-size, whatever euphemism you want to use. There is a danger with this: it excuses obesity, neglects health, creates a false notion of solution. Take for example, this sly subliminal jab that perpetuates what Dove seems to be fighting against:
This advert still enforces the statement, bigger women are much more challenging than 'size 8 supermodels' in "firming the thighs" and etc. That is, bigger women are much more difficult to fit into the mold of "beauty" that standardizes the market and the human psyche today. Now I really don't know if it is more difficult to "firm the thighs" of one type of model over a bigger model and if "skin" products are really the solution to "firming thighs". I guess I always presumed exercise and healthy eating was the way. But this ad in itself, creates the impression that skin products are, the one and only, solution to tightening skin and creating the effect that women want. This, granting my assumption just mentioned, is a gross mischaracterization.
The problem with this kind of ad campaign and its moral message is that it is limited in what it promotes. Your body is not a product of skin products but a whole myriad of things. More specifically, what you eat and how active you are - it would seem safe to say - are direct factors that influence your body. Yes, there are genetic dispositions that can't be helped. But being active and healthy is fundamentally a choice. Some people just don't have the "time" and body image may not be a concern, which is fine - live your life how ever way you deem fit to live it. Some of the greatest pleasures are palatable aesthetic experiences. If 'time' and managing 'health' are concerns on your list, there are little things in terms of food and other things - walking, biking, taking the stairs, drinking water or tea instead of 'diet' soft drinks, etc. etc.. I'm not trying to say what you should or ought to do; do what you do and love life, I'm just saying - excuses are easy and this is what Dove is doing (intentionally or unintentionally).
The moral message of "real women" and "real beauty", at the end of the day, is still selling a Dove product. Substituting one farce for another and impressing a dependency on skin products. The problem and solution to all your beauty concerns: Be "real", use Dove.
*Note: the same about body image goes for men and muscle products or whatever supplements. I only focused on Dove and its approach to women.
(*I know this is a touchy topic, and bold still for a male to be writing on but...)
So Dove has, for some time now, made an active effort to create positive body images for women who don't fit the skinny model mold that is so often glamourized in magazines, tv, movies, and so on.
They've taken the initiative to focus and campaign on "real beauty" with an attempt to invigorate the discussion on what media does to the self-esteem and pressures placed on physical features of women that motivate the vanity fair we run in many societies today. As the ad the left states"the company made the decision to use real women" in hopes that this will boost their product and be more "real" with the people. The ad below considers the issue of self-perception and attempts to shed some light:
In this way, Dove has taken an active or rather open stance about their approach and the photoshopping techniques used to construct a fake image that the models themselves do not live up to:
There have been several documentaries that have attempted to shed further light on the detrimental effect media (television, movies, magazines, billboards, etc.) have had on the body image of women of all ages.A few examples are 'America the Beautiful', 'Killing us softly', 'Miss Representation', and many more. There is a blog (highly recommended) that also focuses on this issue, among other things, at sociological images.
Relatively recently, Dove Canada posted an ad about a trojan horse that targets photoshoppers and what they do to get pictures into a form that is advertisement-ready:
In this particular ad, the target audience are the photoshoppers who get paid to do what they do for advertising agencies and other companies. It's in fact, a very unrealistic attempt to "open the eyes" or "wake up" photoshoppers to a revolution and stand for the principle that what they are doing is "wrong"; as if the photoshoppers are going to stop what they do and leave their job on moral grounds. This, unless you work with a premise that photoshoppers do not have financial concerns, is blatantly absurd. Money as a method of sustaining a lifestyle is also one of the many primary reasons revolutions cannot be maintained. At one point or another, people need to return to the system and make money - pay bills, buy food, feed their children, etc. etc. Escaping the capitalistic cycle is tremendously difficult.
A friend of mine pointed out that Dove, unbeknownst to a male like myself with no particular interest in women's beauty products (whatever commentary that may warrant), is under the auspice of 'Unilever' that also carries brands such as 'Fair & Lovely' "that blatantly promote racism and skewed beauty ideals in India and other countries." The operations of such a company undermines the work that Dove does. However, as any major corporation with multiple brands, it doesn't strike me that the Unilever corporation itself is concerned with women's issues or contradicting campaigns by their brands. The liberal market is about one thing: profit. Much like the satirical comment written by Oliver Stone for Gordon Gecko in the movie 'Wall Street': "Greed is good". This insulates the market, the U.S. market and those that take it as their model, from any moral accountability as long as it makes money. This is a systemic concern about the economy, the market, and how it operates, which warrants another critique that many with much bigger status and intelligence capital than I, have concerned themselves with - Zizek, Badiou, Sandel, etc.
What I would like to bring out is some of the absurdity with Dove's campaign on "real beauty", which they justify with using "real women" in their advertisements.
This campaign of 'real women', 'love your body', 'inner beauty' (all very nice mantras) seems to cross with another campaign that has in a way glorified bigger women, the plus-size, whatever euphemism you want to use. There is a danger with this: it excuses obesity, neglects health, creates a false notion of solution. Take for example, this sly subliminal jab that perpetuates what Dove seems to be fighting against:
This advert still enforces the statement, bigger women are much more challenging than 'size 8 supermodels' in "firming the thighs" and etc. That is, bigger women are much more difficult to fit into the mold of "beauty" that standardizes the market and the human psyche today. Now I really don't know if it is more difficult to "firm the thighs" of one type of model over a bigger model and if "skin" products are really the solution to "firming thighs". I guess I always presumed exercise and healthy eating was the way. But this ad in itself, creates the impression that skin products are, the one and only, solution to tightening skin and creating the effect that women want. This, granting my assumption just mentioned, is a gross mischaracterization.
The problem with this kind of ad campaign and its moral message is that it is limited in what it promotes. Your body is not a product of skin products but a whole myriad of things. More specifically, what you eat and how active you are - it would seem safe to say - are direct factors that influence your body. Yes, there are genetic dispositions that can't be helped. But being active and healthy is fundamentally a choice. Some people just don't have the "time" and body image may not be a concern, which is fine - live your life how ever way you deem fit to live it. Some of the greatest pleasures are palatable aesthetic experiences. If 'time' and managing 'health' are concerns on your list, there are little things in terms of food and other things - walking, biking, taking the stairs, drinking water or tea instead of 'diet' soft drinks, etc. etc.. I'm not trying to say what you should or ought to do; do what you do and love life, I'm just saying - excuses are easy and this is what Dove is doing (intentionally or unintentionally).
The moral message of "real women" and "real beauty", at the end of the day, is still selling a Dove product. Substituting one farce for another and impressing a dependency on skin products. The problem and solution to all your beauty concerns: Be "real", use Dove.
*Note: the same about body image goes for men and muscle products or whatever supplements. I only focused on Dove and its approach to women.
*On Generation Y Protagonists & Special Yuppies (GYPSYs)
There's been an article roaming around about Generation Y and "happiness" or rather "un-happiness".
The article's title is provoking by calling a whole generation: "Yuppies", so it's calling people out and basically trying to argue that this generation is "unhappy" because of this given stance of "expectation".
So who is this Generation Y or what the author calls "GYPSYs" ('Gen Y Protagonists & Special Yuppies' lol)? I've never found these generation titles very convincing or ever figured out what they actually mean and why they're given a particular letter to denote a generation. I mean, what about the generations in between? Why don't they have a letter and a personality type? Anyway... the author is quite specific and says that Generation Y is the group of people born between the late 70s and the mid 90s.
First off, this is a huge number of people. Born between the late 70s and the mid 90s is a span of 15-20 years, and this group of people are GYPSYs - Yuppies who are protagonists to their lives and consider themselves "special" - which is a tacit attack on the neo-liberal psychology. By which I mean the attitude of "I can change the world if I work hard enough" type romanticism that tends to bleed into politics and foreign policy. I'll come back to this later on.
So it seems the GYPSY generation is somewhat of an arbitrary category of people born between a certain time period. Given that this is the Huffington Post, I am going to assume that this is really demarcating either the West or just simply the United States. Talking about the G.I. Generation, the Baby Boomers, and the economic prosperity launched by a slew of de-regulation policies implies as much. If my assumption is correct, there is already a red herring building here. The cultures and subcultures within the West and the United States is extremely diverse. People born from all parts of the world and with a great variety of various upbringing and socio-economic class and so on.
The claim is that this GYPSY generation is "unhappy". Continuing with the demographic critique, does this mean that all GYPSYs regardless of background and socio-economic status "unhappy"? Can we really lump white, black, brown, yellow, pink, purple, and blue all into a single category? Outside of being born in a certain time frame, I find it highly problematic to generalize in this way. But maybe the author is generalizing with a particular ethnocentric view: white, american, middle-upper class labeled 'GYPSY,' because it's just easier and safer to do it that way. And even still there are some issues by calling this generation, in a sense, delusional and unhappy.
So my first question to the author, and this GYPSY category, is who are we really talking about here? Are we really going out on a limb and claiming that all people born between the late 70s and the mid 90s are "unhappy" because of a generational psychology that landed them in a privelaged platform to begin life? I just don't find it plausible - platforms of all types vary. The author needs to be a bit more specific when talking about something like this. But hey, it's an article meant to provoke, bring facebook "likes" or dislikes, stir conversation and bring viewers to the Huffington Post. Not that I have anything particularly against the Huffington Post, just pointing out that it is one of many online news agencies that want to attract people.
The second thing is this definition of "happiness" and it's boiled down to a simple formula. Happiness is Reality - Expectations. Author states: "when the reality of someone's life is better than they had expected, they're happy. When reality turns out to be worse than the expectations, they're unhappy."
While there is something to be said about the contrast between experience and expectation, the illusion is that this contrast is the basic perspective for why persons are "happy" or "unhappy". I find this way too static. Expectations and experiences are always changing and we are continuous in a diachronic fashion. Any kind of happiness or unhappiness is always temporary - if we stick to this reality and life and expectations dialectic. One's perspective on life is always, in a sense, evolving and changing - life and reality is dynamic. The author would have had a better argument if the generalization was about an 'attitude to life' and a persistent demand of entitlement and self-centredness, or egocentrism, as opposed to a singular stance of expectation and experience. But let's give this the benefit of the doubt and grant that this formula is meant to be dynamic and continuous. So...does this mean that when reality is better than expectation one is "happy". 'Happiness' is such a weird concept, I don't know if any one person can generalize their life as just "happy" because things are better than expected. Any dynamic consideration between expectation and experience is bound to have spurts of "unhappiness" in between. I mean, what person doesn't see oscillations of good and bad things happening in life? So what does it mean when somebody says that they are "happy" in life? It's an elusive concept and can lead into a whole different direction about existential angst, crises of meaning, and the role of emotions into a formulaic perspective of happiness in terms of expectation and reality. And I have no intention of delving into that here.
So the author goes on to attack a strawman family with a character named "Lucy" and argues why Lucy is unhappy. The basic argument is that Lucy's parents and grandparents never had it as good as Lucy. So they have a different outlook on expectation and reality, where they can draw on past experiences and say 'oh we had it really rough back then' and now things are "AMAZING" - to quote Louis CK, which is true - technology is pretty amazing. And Lucy, because her life has been sheltered, given great things from the beginning, with the nice house on the hill and the white picket fence, with a lawn, and a dog, and a cat, and a goldfish, that her expectations of what should be granted are so grandiose that they are unrealistic and delusional. So when reality comes along and GYPSYs can't get what they want and expect, they are unhappy.
Furthermore, Lucy has been raised to think that she's special and that she can "be whatever you want to be" and grows up thinking that she can be this great protagonist, "wildly ambitious" , who is going to make the world all rainbows and unicorns because Jesus loves you. (*Just by looking at the generational picture the author is painting it seems that my assumption about this GYPSY category is white, american, middle-upper class, and Christian - this is an assumption as well, but let's face it most white people of this category are nominally "Christian"). The author is basically saying that this generation of people are delusional and spoiled. Yuppies. And there is, I think truth to this, there is a neo-liberal psychology that pervades a demographic of America, which is coupled with a ridiculous sense of entitlement. Louis CK picks up on this kind of spoiled attitude that, I'm sure many of us can attest to, a lot of Americans have. For example (up to the 7:30 mark):
It certainly has not helped the image of Americans in the rest of the world. So if we take the attitude Louis is describing with Prof. Handler, an anthropologist, and his talk about the neoliberal attitude - in the creation of a global development program at Univ. of Virginia, and how anthropologists can help by critiquing culture rather than fuel the delusion that if you only know more about different cultures you can help save the world - then you have a better composition of what the GYPSY article is getting at, which is not a critique on a generational attitude but rather a pervasive and perpetuated culture that has been brewing in the west.
So, this article I think is embodied, in addition to Louis CK's rant on phones and flying, in this little clip here, and they retort an appropriate response:
This yuppy stuff the author is attacking actually exists in every generation. The author is detaching the values of an entire generation from the prior generation and the one before that who perpetuate this attitude. The actual critique should be directed at the notion of 'American Exceptionalism', delusional neo-liberalism, and the utter insulated self-centredness of some Americans instead of a singlular critique at a strawman generation of "yuppies". The GYPSYs did not come about on their own and not all GYPSYs are really GYPSYs and not all of them are "unhappy" - whatever that means.
The article's title is provoking by calling a whole generation: "Yuppies", so it's calling people out and basically trying to argue that this generation is "unhappy" because of this given stance of "expectation".
So who is this Generation Y or what the author calls "GYPSYs" ('Gen Y Protagonists & Special Yuppies' lol)? I've never found these generation titles very convincing or ever figured out what they actually mean and why they're given a particular letter to denote a generation. I mean, what about the generations in between? Why don't they have a letter and a personality type? Anyway... the author is quite specific and says that Generation Y is the group of people born between the late 70s and the mid 90s.
First off, this is a huge number of people. Born between the late 70s and the mid 90s is a span of 15-20 years, and this group of people are GYPSYs - Yuppies who are protagonists to their lives and consider themselves "special" - which is a tacit attack on the neo-liberal psychology. By which I mean the attitude of "I can change the world if I work hard enough" type romanticism that tends to bleed into politics and foreign policy. I'll come back to this later on.
So it seems the GYPSY generation is somewhat of an arbitrary category of people born between a certain time period. Given that this is the Huffington Post, I am going to assume that this is really demarcating either the West or just simply the United States. Talking about the G.I. Generation, the Baby Boomers, and the economic prosperity launched by a slew of de-regulation policies implies as much. If my assumption is correct, there is already a red herring building here. The cultures and subcultures within the West and the United States is extremely diverse. People born from all parts of the world and with a great variety of various upbringing and socio-economic class and so on.
The claim is that this GYPSY generation is "unhappy". Continuing with the demographic critique, does this mean that all GYPSYs regardless of background and socio-economic status "unhappy"? Can we really lump white, black, brown, yellow, pink, purple, and blue all into a single category? Outside of being born in a certain time frame, I find it highly problematic to generalize in this way. But maybe the author is generalizing with a particular ethnocentric view: white, american, middle-upper class labeled 'GYPSY,' because it's just easier and safer to do it that way. And even still there are some issues by calling this generation, in a sense, delusional and unhappy.
So my first question to the author, and this GYPSY category, is who are we really talking about here? Are we really going out on a limb and claiming that all people born between the late 70s and the mid 90s are "unhappy" because of a generational psychology that landed them in a privelaged platform to begin life? I just don't find it plausible - platforms of all types vary. The author needs to be a bit more specific when talking about something like this. But hey, it's an article meant to provoke, bring facebook "likes" or dislikes, stir conversation and bring viewers to the Huffington Post. Not that I have anything particularly against the Huffington Post, just pointing out that it is one of many online news agencies that want to attract people.
The second thing is this definition of "happiness" and it's boiled down to a simple formula. Happiness is Reality - Expectations. Author states: "when the reality of someone's life is better than they had expected, they're happy. When reality turns out to be worse than the expectations, they're unhappy."
While there is something to be said about the contrast between experience and expectation, the illusion is that this contrast is the basic perspective for why persons are "happy" or "unhappy". I find this way too static. Expectations and experiences are always changing and we are continuous in a diachronic fashion. Any kind of happiness or unhappiness is always temporary - if we stick to this reality and life and expectations dialectic. One's perspective on life is always, in a sense, evolving and changing - life and reality is dynamic. The author would have had a better argument if the generalization was about an 'attitude to life' and a persistent demand of entitlement and self-centredness, or egocentrism, as opposed to a singular stance of expectation and experience. But let's give this the benefit of the doubt and grant that this formula is meant to be dynamic and continuous. So...does this mean that when reality is better than expectation one is "happy". 'Happiness' is such a weird concept, I don't know if any one person can generalize their life as just "happy" because things are better than expected. Any dynamic consideration between expectation and experience is bound to have spurts of "unhappiness" in between. I mean, what person doesn't see oscillations of good and bad things happening in life? So what does it mean when somebody says that they are "happy" in life? It's an elusive concept and can lead into a whole different direction about existential angst, crises of meaning, and the role of emotions into a formulaic perspective of happiness in terms of expectation and reality. And I have no intention of delving into that here.
So the author goes on to attack a strawman family with a character named "Lucy" and argues why Lucy is unhappy. The basic argument is that Lucy's parents and grandparents never had it as good as Lucy. So they have a different outlook on expectation and reality, where they can draw on past experiences and say 'oh we had it really rough back then' and now things are "AMAZING" - to quote Louis CK, which is true - technology is pretty amazing. And Lucy, because her life has been sheltered, given great things from the beginning, with the nice house on the hill and the white picket fence, with a lawn, and a dog, and a cat, and a goldfish, that her expectations of what should be granted are so grandiose that they are unrealistic and delusional. So when reality comes along and GYPSYs can't get what they want and expect, they are unhappy.
Furthermore, Lucy has been raised to think that she's special and that she can "be whatever you want to be" and grows up thinking that she can be this great protagonist, "wildly ambitious" , who is going to make the world all rainbows and unicorns because Jesus loves you. (*Just by looking at the generational picture the author is painting it seems that my assumption about this GYPSY category is white, american, middle-upper class, and Christian - this is an assumption as well, but let's face it most white people of this category are nominally "Christian"). The author is basically saying that this generation of people are delusional and spoiled. Yuppies. And there is, I think truth to this, there is a neo-liberal psychology that pervades a demographic of America, which is coupled with a ridiculous sense of entitlement. Louis CK picks up on this kind of spoiled attitude that, I'm sure many of us can attest to, a lot of Americans have. For example (up to the 7:30 mark):
It certainly has not helped the image of Americans in the rest of the world. So if we take the attitude Louis is describing with Prof. Handler, an anthropologist, and his talk about the neoliberal attitude - in the creation of a global development program at Univ. of Virginia, and how anthropologists can help by critiquing culture rather than fuel the delusion that if you only know more about different cultures you can help save the world - then you have a better composition of what the GYPSY article is getting at, which is not a critique on a generational attitude but rather a pervasive and perpetuated culture that has been brewing in the west.
So, this article I think is embodied, in addition to Louis CK's rant on phones and flying, in this little clip here, and they retort an appropriate response:
This yuppy stuff the author is attacking actually exists in every generation. The author is detaching the values of an entire generation from the prior generation and the one before that who perpetuate this attitude. The actual critique should be directed at the notion of 'American Exceptionalism', delusional neo-liberalism, and the utter insulated self-centredness of some Americans instead of a singlular critique at a strawman generation of "yuppies". The GYPSYs did not come about on their own and not all GYPSYs are really GYPSYs and not all of them are "unhappy" - whatever that means.
An East meets West Infographic
The artist Yang Liu, born in China and lived in Germany since 14, has created an East v. West series of minimalist representations of what she perceives as differences between China and Germany. Pretty clever. Of course there are going to be variations from Germany and other western nations just as there are going to be variations from China and other eastern nations.
Check it out here
'The Atlantic' mentions it as well
Check it out here
'The Atlantic' mentions it as well
Spinoza
"I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, not to hate them, but to understand them."
-Baruch Spinoza, Tractatus Politicus, 1676
-Baruch Spinoza, Tractatus Politicus, 1676
Thursday, September 26, 2013
Stress influences moral behaviour
Apparently, participants under stress are more likely to be pro-social and share money (the experimental setup) with another participant than those who are not.
However, in another study, those who were under stress are not likely to donate money to an anonymous charity than those in the non-stress condition.
more here
*Update: Apparently so does testosterone in women
However, in another study, those who were under stress are not likely to donate money to an anonymous charity than those in the non-stress condition.
more here
*Update: Apparently so does testosterone in women
Grieving in the 21st Century
"It's all part of denying the "messiness of the corpse" and
"returning" the dead to us, whether by paying tribute through car
decals, T-shirts, online memorials or tattoos etched in conventional ink
or even mixed with "cremains" -- cremated human remains, says Baylor
University scholar and author Candi Cann, Ph.D."
more here
more here
Catholicism: Crisis or Catastrophe
From May 15, 2013 @ CUNY Graduate Center
The Committee for the Study of Religion
More here:
http://studyofreligion.gc.cuny.edu/2013/09/video-of-catholicism-catholicism-crisis-or-catastrophe-conference-may15th-2013/
The Committee for the Study of Religion
More here:
http://studyofreligion.gc.cuny.edu/2013/09/video-of-catholicism-catholicism-crisis-or-catastrophe-conference-may15th-2013/
Tuesday, September 24, 2013
Study of Religion and Law
"After" Religious Freedom?: On the Relationship Between the Academic Study of Religion and Law here
*Update: on Method, Practice and Theory, The Role of Doctrine
Dworkin- 'Religion without God'
Dworkin's latest book, published posthumously:
'Religion without God'
is based on his 2011 'Einstein lectures' given at the University of Bern.
You can find links to reviews, an excerpt of the book, and video footage of his lectures here
From the publishers:
"Dworkin joins Einstein’s sense of cosmic mystery and beauty to the claim that value is objective, independent of mind, and immanent in the world. He rejects the metaphysics of naturalism—that nothing is real except what can be studied by the natural sciences. Belief in God is one manifestation of this deeper worldview, but not the only one. The conviction that God underwrites value presupposes a prior commitment to the independent reality of that value—a commitment that is available to nonbelievers as well. So theists share a commitment with some atheists that is more fundamental than what divides them. Freedom of religion should flow not from a respect for belief in God but from the right to ethical independence."
Pascal's Wager expanded to other religions
Not sure about the source by which the chart is constructed. But fun nonetheless.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2013/09/23/pascals-wager-expanded-edition/
Monday, September 23, 2013
History and Social Construction of Sympathy in America
'Learning Sympathy' by Claude S. Fischer
The article doesn't deny the emotion of sympathy but rather discusses the context in which it has been cultivated and construed in U.S. history.
Further reading can be found in Jesse Prinz's 'The Emotional Construction of Morals'
review here
The article doesn't deny the emotion of sympathy but rather discusses the context in which it has been cultivated and construed in U.S. history.
Further reading can be found in Jesse Prinz's 'The Emotional Construction of Morals'
review here
Glenn Wilson: The Psychology of Money
Glenn Wilson: The Psychology of Money from Gresham College on FORA.tv
'The Anthropology of Money and Finance: from ethnography to world history'
by Keith Hart : here
The Marshmellow Test
According to Peg Streep on this Marshmellow test:
"While the researchers don’t talk about attachment
in their article—they talk about unreliability — I think all of this
makes terrific sense. As I’ve already written in an earlier blog post
—“Daughters of Unloving Mothers: 7 Common Wounds”—attachment theory
explains a great deal about human behavior, and perhaps the ability to
exert self-control is yet another area where what we learn at the
beginning affects both our abilities and mindsets. To a small child, an
emotionally unreliable or inconsistent or cruel parent doesn’t just demonstrate her or his nature,
but the nature of the world and relationships. If you’re used to
broken promises, it makes sense that you’d eat that marshmallow pronto.
So,
for the seventy percent of you who have trouble resisting the
temptation of the marshmallow, it may not just be about self-control
after all. You may have to understand how the past, your past, still
motivates your behavior. To resist the marshmallow, rewrite your own
script."
Streep would have you believe that the behaviors of small children and the resistance to the marshmellow, or lack thereof, is just due to the "attachment style" a child has with his/her parent - usually indicating the mother.
While parent-child relationships certainly have a place for how children learn self-control, discipline, and other "character traits" there is a much more basic answer than diving into attachment theory and overly complicating a child's behavior with a marshmellow and diving into a psychoanalytic explanation. It is widely known, at least within the neuroscience community, that there are two separate neural systems that involve reward. One that involves short-term gratification and the other long-term delay in the reception of monetary rewards. The study states:
"More generally, our present results converge with those of a series of recent imaging studies that have examined the role of limbic structures in valuation and decision making (26, 43, 44) and interactions between prefrontal cortex and limbic mechanisms in a variety of behavioral contexts, ranging from economic and moral decision making to more visceral responses, such as pain and disgust (45–48). Collectively, these studies suggest that human behavior is often governed by a competition between lower level, automatic processes that may reflect evolutionary adaptations to particular environments, and the more recently evolved, uniquely human capacity for abstract, domain-general reasoning and future planning. Within the domain of intertemporal choice, the idiosyncrasies of human preferences seem to reflect a competition between the impetuous limbic grasshopper and the provident prefrontal ant within each of us."
What this says is really quite basic with respect to the Marshmellow test. Children's brains simply aren't developed enough and the younger you are, the harder the struggle with the Marshmellow (I exclude cases of abused children and their fear of their parents, simply because abuse affects developemnt in other ways - if an abusive father presented the same marshmellow test to his abused child, the results will certainly be different).
Similar studies have also been done with teenagers - because the brain doesn't fully reach maturity until 25-28 - and drugs (tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, etc. etc.).
While I don't want to diminish the significance of the parent-child relationship, there are some things that must be fundamentally understood about the way we act and our brain development.
Update 10/23: More here
"Science as a Culture in Culture with Deep-Structure Across Empirical Studies in Psychology, Kwang-Kuo Hwang"
Interesting debate on the philosophy of science and cross-cultural psychology: Prof. Hwang discusses his debate with Prof. Allport:
Hwang, Kwang-Kuo.2013. “Science as a Culture in Culture with Deep-Structure Across Empirical Studies in Psychology” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 2 (10): 38-51.
Abstract
Hwang, Kwang-Kuo.2013. “Science as a Culture in Culture with Deep-Structure Across Empirical Studies in Psychology” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 2 (10): 38-51.
Abstract
In his rejoinder to my article, “The construction of culture-inclusive theories by multiple philosophical paradigms” (2013),
Professor Allwood advocates for the advantages of an empirically
oriented cultural concept in indigenous psychologies. Allwood’s advocacy
reveals an insistence on an empiricist research orientation.
Empiricists regard the collection of empirical facts as the ultimate
goal of scientific research. They do not believe that there is any deep
structure behind the observed phenomena in a culture. Therefore, they
cannot understand the necessity of constructing a scientific microworld
distinctive from the lifeworld. In this article, I indicate that there
are “deep structures” in both culture and science as a culture in
culture. Scientists are seeking for the “deep structure,” i.e. the
so-called “generative mechanism” in Bhaskar’s (1975) philosophy of
Critical Realism. Thus, it is necessary to make a clear distinction
between scientific microworld and lifeworld.
For more: here
Sunday, September 22, 2013
Comic books in U.S. Religion history
Francis Brother of the Universe
Vol. 1, No. 1, 1978
!!
Suggestions on incorporating comics into American religious history: here
Vol. 1, No. 1, 1978
!!
Suggestions on incorporating comics into American religious history: here
Friday, September 20, 2013
Pinker v. Spelke on 'The Science of Gender and Science'
This debate was actually sparked by a comment made by Larry Summers - past Harvard President and potential candidate(?) for the Federal Reserve - see here and here
In a way, you could say that Pinker is Summer's pinch hitter for the debate and his comments on "innate mathematical ability" in women.
You can follow the debate (transcript and slide presentation) here
In a way, you could say that Pinker is Summer's pinch hitter for the debate and his comments on "innate mathematical ability" in women.
You can follow the debate (transcript and slide presentation) here
Pinker on Morality + the debate he sparked on science and the humanities
Pinker on science and the humanities:
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114127/science-not-enemy-humanities
Wieseltier responds:
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114548/leon-wieseltier-responds-steven-pinkers-scientism
Dennet weighs in:
http://www.edge.org/conversation/dennett-on-wieseltier-v-pinker-in-the-new-republic
Gutting gets in:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/18/sciences-humanities-gap/
*There are plenty others who have also weighed in on this debate between the relationship between science and the humanities. But I've only posted the ones that have seemed to merit recognition by others in the sea of academia online.
Thursday, September 19, 2013
Quotes priming the Sociology of Knowledge
"It is only through the conversation of man with man that ideas come into existence. Two human beings are as necessary for the generation of the human mind as they are for the generation of the human body."
-Feuerbach
"It is not given to us to grasp the truth, which is identical with the divine, directly. We perceive it only in reflection, in example and symbol, in singular and related appearances. It meets us as a kind of life which is incomprehensible to us, and yet we cannot free ourselves from the desire to comprehend it"
-Goethe
***And....a day at the park...definitely worth it.
-Feuerbach
"It is not given to us to grasp the truth, which is identical with the divine, directly. We perceive it only in reflection, in example and symbol, in singular and related appearances. It meets us as a kind of life which is incomprehensible to us, and yet we cannot free ourselves from the desire to comprehend it"
-Goethe
***And....a day at the park...definitely worth it.
An interview with Pope Francis
Published in the magazine America: here
The Religion News Service point out a few highlights:
*Updates:
Pope Francis Excommunicates Australian Priest Who Advocated For Gay Marriage And Female Clergy
and here
What Pope Francis Thinks About Women in the Church
The Religion News Service point out a few highlights:
- “We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods. This is not possible. I have not spoken much about these things, and I was reprimanded for that … The teaching of the church, for that matter, is clear and I am a son of the church, but it is not necessary to talk about these issues all the time.”
- “A person once asked me, in a provocative manner, if I approved of homosexuality. I replied with another question: ‘Tell me: when God looks at a gay person, does he endorse the existence of this person, or reject and condemn this person? We must always consider the person.”
- “My authoritarian and quick manner of making decisions led me to have serious problems and to be accused of being ultraconservative … but I have never been a right-winger.”
- “We should not even think, therefore, that ‘thinking with the church’ means only thinking with the hierarchy of the church.”
- “If the Christian is a restorationist, a legalist, if he wants everything clear and safe, then he will find nothing.”
- “I am a sinner. This is the most accurate definition. It is not a figure of speech, a literary genre. I am a sinner.”
*Updates:
Pope Francis Excommunicates Australian Priest Who Advocated For Gay Marriage And Female Clergy
and here
What Pope Francis Thinks About Women in the Church
Wednesday, September 18, 2013
Martin Stringer on Situational Belief
In an interview (Podcast) Stringer discusses his concept of 'situational belief' here
I don't disagree with Stringer's concept of 'situational belief' but it begs the question if 'belief statements' are indeed "beliefs" (in the way that the West considers them to be) or merely statements of situational acceptance and rationalizations. Furthermore, I think the interviewer is ill informed about Festinger and the theory of cognitive dissonance. Dissonance theory actually accounts for these contradictory "belief-statements" that Stringer wants to discuss. They are not incompatible at all, contrary to what both of them think in the podcast. The concept of belief is much more nuanced than just belief-statements. It's as if they've never heard of someone lying or exaggerating the truth.
Hermann Hesse wrote in both Siddhartha and Journey to the East that
"Words do not express thoughts very well; everything immediately becomes a little different, a little distorted, a little foolish. And yet it also pleases me and seems right that what is of value and wisdom to one man seems nonsense to another."
Which is also to say that we do not always convey accurately what we think to others or ensure that others will accurately understand what we mean when we say something. In this sense, I would argue that language or "belief-statements" - as empirical data - is insufficient to measure or ascribe belief to another person. There has to be more to it.
Anyway...if I keep going this goes into my thesis and that would make this blog post much longer than it intended to be. For now it is sufficient to make my point that "situational belief" is not incongruent with Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance and that 'belief-statements' are in fact insufficient markers for a fruitful and meaningful discussion of belief. Sticking to statements only plays on the surface of the iceberg as opposed to a holistic consideration.
There is a response by a Liam Sutherland to Martin Stringer at the Religious Studies Project: here
I don't disagree with Stringer's concept of 'situational belief' but it begs the question if 'belief statements' are indeed "beliefs" (in the way that the West considers them to be) or merely statements of situational acceptance and rationalizations. Furthermore, I think the interviewer is ill informed about Festinger and the theory of cognitive dissonance. Dissonance theory actually accounts for these contradictory "belief-statements" that Stringer wants to discuss. They are not incompatible at all, contrary to what both of them think in the podcast. The concept of belief is much more nuanced than just belief-statements. It's as if they've never heard of someone lying or exaggerating the truth.
Hermann Hesse wrote in both Siddhartha and Journey to the East that
"Words do not express thoughts very well; everything immediately becomes a little different, a little distorted, a little foolish. And yet it also pleases me and seems right that what is of value and wisdom to one man seems nonsense to another."
Which is also to say that we do not always convey accurately what we think to others or ensure that others will accurately understand what we mean when we say something. In this sense, I would argue that language or "belief-statements" - as empirical data - is insufficient to measure or ascribe belief to another person. There has to be more to it.
Anyway...if I keep going this goes into my thesis and that would make this blog post much longer than it intended to be. For now it is sufficient to make my point that "situational belief" is not incongruent with Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance and that 'belief-statements' are in fact insufficient markers for a fruitful and meaningful discussion of belief. Sticking to statements only plays on the surface of the iceberg as opposed to a holistic consideration.
There is a response by a Liam Sutherland to Martin Stringer at the Religious Studies Project: here
Tolstoy on Crisis
"I felt that something had broken within me on which my life had always rested, that I had nothing left to hold on to, and that morally my life had stopped. An invincible force impelled me to get rid of my experience, in one way or another. It cannot be said exactly that I wished to kill myself, for the force which drew me away from life was fuller, more powerful, more general than any mere desire. It was a force like my old aspiration to live, only it impelled me in the opposite direction. It was an aspiration of my whole being to get out of life...
I could give no reasonable meaning to any actions of my life. And I was surprised that I had not understood this from the very beginning. My state of mind was as if some wicked and stupid jest was being played upon me by someone. One can live only so long as one is intoxicated, drunk with life; but when one grows sober one cannot fail to see that it is all a stupid cheat. What is truest about it is that there is nothing even funny or silly in it; it is cruel and stupid, purely and simply...
What will be the outcome of what I do today? Of what I shall do tomorrow? What will be the outcome of all my life? Why should I live? Why should I do anything? Is there in life any purpose which the inevitable death which awaits me does not undo and destroy?"
-Leo Tolstoy, My Confessions 1904, pp. 20-22
Anecdotal sidenote:
I remember when my father told me that depression didn't exist when he was growing up - very poor, just after the devastation of the Korean War. People were too busy living to get depressed! He basically told me that depression is a bourgeoisie ailment. lol. Poor working folk don't have the time nor do they concern themselves with existential questions that give rise to such angstiness. This isn't to say that people didn't commit suicide, but that it was primarily a result of radically different reasons.
SO, my question is then, is depression and existential crisis symptomatic of modern society? Broad question I know. Is it primarily a western bourgeoisie phenomenon that has trickled down into the people's psyche with the gradual development of society such that persons can now - with private property (to be Marxist) - effectively live in alienation, isolation, and stress individuality, authenticity, originality etc.?
I would be willing to bet, and would love to do the research even more, that the reasons and the nature of the suicide note has changed considerably since the early 1900s and now. Or even just looking at Korea, within a 50 year timeframe, from 1953 - the armistice - to 2003. The reasons for suicide have probably changed.
I could give no reasonable meaning to any actions of my life. And I was surprised that I had not understood this from the very beginning. My state of mind was as if some wicked and stupid jest was being played upon me by someone. One can live only so long as one is intoxicated, drunk with life; but when one grows sober one cannot fail to see that it is all a stupid cheat. What is truest about it is that there is nothing even funny or silly in it; it is cruel and stupid, purely and simply...
What will be the outcome of what I do today? Of what I shall do tomorrow? What will be the outcome of all my life? Why should I live? Why should I do anything? Is there in life any purpose which the inevitable death which awaits me does not undo and destroy?"
-Leo Tolstoy, My Confessions 1904, pp. 20-22
Anecdotal sidenote:
I remember when my father told me that depression didn't exist when he was growing up - very poor, just after the devastation of the Korean War. People were too busy living to get depressed! He basically told me that depression is a bourgeoisie ailment. lol. Poor working folk don't have the time nor do they concern themselves with existential questions that give rise to such angstiness. This isn't to say that people didn't commit suicide, but that it was primarily a result of radically different reasons.
SO, my question is then, is depression and existential crisis symptomatic of modern society? Broad question I know. Is it primarily a western bourgeoisie phenomenon that has trickled down into the people's psyche with the gradual development of society such that persons can now - with private property (to be Marxist) - effectively live in alienation, isolation, and stress individuality, authenticity, originality etc.?
I would be willing to bet, and would love to do the research even more, that the reasons and the nature of the suicide note has changed considerably since the early 1900s and now. Or even just looking at Korea, within a 50 year timeframe, from 1953 - the armistice - to 2003. The reasons for suicide have probably changed.
Tuesday, September 17, 2013
Charting Culture
These are always a bit dubious and cries for a non-essentialist critique...
But this is the proposal from Lewis according to Slate:
Lewis plots countries in relation to three categories:
But this is the proposal from Lewis according to Slate:
Lewis plots countries in relation to three categories:
Linear-actives—those who plan, schedule, organize, pursue action chains, do one thing at a time. Germans and Swiss are in this group.
Multi-actives—those lively, loquacious peoples who do many things at once, planning their priorities not according to a time schedule, but according to the relative thrill or importance that each appointment brings with it. Italians, Latin Americans and Arabs are members of this group.
Reactives—those cultures that prioritize courtesy and respect, listening quietly and calmly to their interlocutors and reacting carefully to the other side's proposals. Chinese, Japanese and Finns are in this group.
He says that this categorization of national norms does not change significantly over time:
The behavior of people of different cultures is not something willy-nilly. There exist clear trends, sequences and traditions. Reactions of Americans, Europeans, and Asians alike can be forecasted, usually justified and in the majority of cases managed. Even in countries where political and economic change is currently rapid or sweeping (Russia, China, Hungary, Poland, Korea, Malaysia, etc.) deeply rooted attitudes and beliefs will resist a sudden transformation of values when pressured by reformists, governments or multinational conglomerates.
Here's the chart that "explains the world":
http://www.slate.com/blogs/business_insider/2013/09/08/the_lewis_model_explains_world_cultures_through_language.html
Top 10 Journals of Philosophy
Journal rankings for 2012
Top 10 journals of philosophy - SJR
(01) 2.026 Philosophical Review
(02) 2.020 Ethics
(03) 1.339 Nous
(04) 1.246 Journal of Philosophy
(05) 1.245 Logica Universalis
(06) 1.161 Review of Philosophy and Psychology
(07) 1.080 British Journal for the Philosophy of Science
(08) 1.075 Mind
(09) 1.052 Philosophical Quarterly
(10) 0.988 Analysis
The full list can be found here
More about the SJR indicator:
Monday, September 16, 2013
Podcast episode on Nietzsche
On 'Ideas' with Paul Kennedy:
Participants in the program:
Brian Leiter is the Karl N. Llewellyn Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the Center for Law, Philosophy & Human Values at the University of Chicago.
Rebecca Comay, is a professor in the Department of Philosophy and Centre for Comparative Literature, University of Toronto.
Christine Daigle, is a professor in the Department of Philosophy and Chancellor's Chair for Research Excellence, Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario.
listen here
(if it doesn't work, go to the link above and click 'listen')
"God is dead. And we have killed him."
-Friedrich Nietzsche
Participants in the program:
Brian Leiter is the Karl N. Llewellyn Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the Center for Law, Philosophy & Human Values at the University of Chicago.
Rebecca Comay, is a professor in the Department of Philosophy and Centre for Comparative Literature, University of Toronto.
Christine Daigle, is a professor in the Department of Philosophy and Chancellor's Chair for Research Excellence, Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario.
listen here
(if it doesn't work, go to the link above and click 'listen')
"Religion & Belief, Discrimination and Equality in England and Wales"
"Research for the report Religion and Belief, Discrimination and Equality
in England and Wales: A Decade of Continuity and Change was led by Paul
Weller, Professor of Inter-Religious Relations at Derby, working with
Oxford and Manchester universities."
"The research's chief findings include:
general feeling among respondents that better public education, and greater collaboration between different religions and communities, were now the best ways to continue to combat unfair treatment based on religion or belief;
substantial reporting of unfair treatment on the basis of religion or belief does continue across key areas of people's lives;
but indications that changes in the law had contributed to a reduction in the reported experience of unfair treatment on the basis of religion or belief;
especially among certain religious groups - such as Muslims, Pagans and new religious movements - unfair treatment continues to arise in key aspects of people's lives such as work, education and encounters with the media;
Christians citing unfair treatment around wearing crosses, reporting pressure to work Sundays by employers and a sense of their religion being marginalised whilst other faiths received fairer treatment;
some non-religious people quizzed in the project's focus groups highlighting the sense that Christians received privileged treatment, especially around matters of education and governance."
More here
"The research's chief findings include:
general feeling among respondents that better public education, and greater collaboration between different religions and communities, were now the best ways to continue to combat unfair treatment based on religion or belief;
substantial reporting of unfair treatment on the basis of religion or belief does continue across key areas of people's lives;
but indications that changes in the law had contributed to a reduction in the reported experience of unfair treatment on the basis of religion or belief;
especially among certain religious groups - such as Muslims, Pagans and new religious movements - unfair treatment continues to arise in key aspects of people's lives such as work, education and encounters with the media;
Christians citing unfair treatment around wearing crosses, reporting pressure to work Sundays by employers and a sense of their religion being marginalised whilst other faiths received fairer treatment;
some non-religious people quizzed in the project's focus groups highlighting the sense that Christians received privileged treatment, especially around matters of education and governance."
More here
Sunday, September 15, 2013
Friday, September 13, 2013
Berlin on Machiavelli
"Whenever a thinker, however distant from us in time or culture, still stirs a passion, enthusiasm or indignation, or any kind of intense debate, it is generally the case that he has propounded a thesis which upsets some deeply established idee recue, a thesis which those who wish to cling to the old conviction nevertheless find it hard or impossible to dismiss or refute. This is the case with Plato, Hobbes, Rousseau, Marx. I should like to suggest that it is Machiavelli's juxtaposition of the two outlooks - the two incompatible moral worlds, as it were - in the minds of his readers, and the collision and acute moral discomfort which follow, that, over the years, has been responsible for the desperate efforts to interpret his doctrines away, to represent him as a cynical and therefore ultimately shallow defender of power politics, or as a diabolist, or as a patriot prescribing for particularly desperate situations which seldom arise, or as a mere time-server, or as an embittered political failure, or as nothing more than a mouthpiece of truths we have always known but did not like to utter, or again as the enlightened translator of universally accepted ancient social principles into empirical terms, or as a crypto-republican satirist (a descendant of Juvenal, a forerunner of Orwell); or as a cold scientist, a mere political technologist free from moral implications; or as a typical Renaissance publicist practising a now obsolete genre; or in any of the numerous other roles that have been and are still being cast for him."
-Sir Isaac Berlin, 'On the Originality of Machiavelli' p. 315-6
-Sir Isaac Berlin, 'On the Originality of Machiavelli' p. 315-6
Cultural Crisis
“The necessity, in the end, of yielding to hard and inexplicable realities that are beyond our control is a tragic
truth…That so much of contemporary culture is characterized by [a] kind
of sentimentality, by a seeming preference for false ‘closures’ over a
strong and meaningful confrontation with real and inalterable pain, is a
cultural crisis.”
- Daniel Mendelsohn in How Beautiful It Is And How Easily It Can Be Broken
- Daniel Mendelsohn in How Beautiful It Is And How Easily It Can Be Broken
Tuesday, September 10, 2013
Thought Police?
Debate around neuroscience, law, and morality at the Huffington Post:
Source: here
Source: here
- Dov Fox (San Diego, CA) Assistant Professor of Law at University of San Diego
- John Bohannon (Cambridge, MA) Biologist and Science Journalist
- Jonathan Cohen (San Diego, CA) Professor of Philosophy at UCSD
- Susan Schneider (Canberra, Australia) Associate Professor of Philosophy at UConn
- Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (Durham, NC) Professor of Practical Ethics at Duke University; Co-director of the MacArthur Law and Neuroscience Project
Un-Hired Ed
Ouch, America:
http://www.online-phd-programs.org/adjunct/
updated comments on this infograph from leiterreports
Source: Online-PhD-Programs.org
http://www.online-phd-programs.org/adjunct/
updated comments on this infograph from leiterreports
Source: Online-PhD-Programs.org
Anthropology of International Relations?
Zero Anthropology comments on Russia's Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov.
"Lavrov speaks on law, freedom, surveillance, and especially in the final paragraph here, attitudes of civilizational superiority that deny the dignity of others."
here
"All those, who think that they will be able to establish laws from the epoch of lawlessness, probably act short-sightedly. It will definitely catch up with them later.
Source
"Lavrov speaks on law, freedom, surveillance, and especially in the final paragraph here, attitudes of civilizational superiority that deny the dignity of others."
here
"All those, who think that they will be able to establish laws from the epoch of lawlessness, probably act short-sightedly. It will definitely catch up with them later.
What
happens with the freedom of the Internet? We were told many times, that
there can be no limits by definition. As it seems, this position, which
was translated at international forums, was not at all a guide for
actions of those, who promoted it in public. In practice, freedom of the
Internet was abused and, probably, continues to be abused, as we say,
very deeply. For the time being, this is probably causing a mess, at
least in terms of morals and ethics.
You
can pick any sphere, and it is always better to follow the rules, to
respect peoples and help them reach an agreement with each other, rather
than thinking in categories of “gunboat diplomacy”, stop to be sick
[nostalgic] for the colonial past, the epoch, when they needed just to
whisper for everybody to show servile obedience. The world is changing
today. It is impolite and short-sighted to perceive other civilisations
as second class groups of the population. It will catch you up sometime
in the future. We need to avoid the war of civilisations in all possible
ways. We are for dialogue, for the alliance of civilisations. But in
this case we need to respect each other’s traditions, the history of
those communities, which become more and more significant on our planet,
to respect the values, which have been created, established for
centuries in these societies and were transferred from one generation to
another. It is so simple – if you wish to get on well within your
neighbours in your village, the same principles apply. A disregard for
such principles in the international arena costs much more for taxpayers
as well, and, the worst – for peoples’ lives, who then become
“collateral damage”. This terrible term (collateral damage) was invented
to justify the gross violations of international humanitarian law and
is rooted deeply in those, who promote concepts like “responsibility to
protect”, “humanitarian intervention” – when the motto of human rights
is used to disrupt the most crucial right – the right to live…."
Source
Wednesday, September 4, 2013
Documentary: 'The Lord is Not on Trial Here Today'
"The Lord Is Not On Trial Here Today is a Peabody and Emmy
Award-winning documentary that tells the compelling personal story of
the late Vashti McCollum, and how her efforts to protect her ten
year-old son led to one of the most important and landmark First
Amendment cases in U.S. Supreme Court history – the case that
established the separation of church and state in public schools."
Found here
The Lord is Not on Trial Here Today from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo.
Found here
The Lord is Not on Trial Here Today from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo.
Monday, September 2, 2013
"Morality without God"
Primatologist Frans de Waal argues that morality predates religion. If this is the case in our evolutionary history then it would be possible for people to have morality without appealing to God or religion.
Troy Jollimore makes the argument:
"Jollimore [...] cites Socrates’ arguments in the “Euthyphro” to assert that the need for a God-based morality is not just unnecessary, but incoherent. So why do so many remain unconvinced? Jollimore largely blames modern attempts to formulate an “ethics beyond religion,” and the Kantian and utilitarian projects particularly, for not offering a robust enough account of the moral life. Jollimore thinks the more up-to-date “particularism” of Iris Murdoch and John McDowell does a better job of integrating “theory and experience.” Their thought in turn, Jollimore thinks, owes much to the unfashionable Aristotelian notion of “practical wisdom,” and an ethical system based not on “rules,” but on character, judgement, and the virtues. “Moral particularism,” then, is a “secular ethics” that is based more in practice than in theory; it’s also one that Jollimore concedes “shares some important common ground with religious tradition.” (Copied from the NYT)
Jollimore's full essay entitled 'Godless but good' can be found here
Troy Jollimore makes the argument:
"Jollimore [...] cites Socrates’ arguments in the “Euthyphro” to assert that the need for a God-based morality is not just unnecessary, but incoherent. So why do so many remain unconvinced? Jollimore largely blames modern attempts to formulate an “ethics beyond religion,” and the Kantian and utilitarian projects particularly, for not offering a robust enough account of the moral life. Jollimore thinks the more up-to-date “particularism” of Iris Murdoch and John McDowell does a better job of integrating “theory and experience.” Their thought in turn, Jollimore thinks, owes much to the unfashionable Aristotelian notion of “practical wisdom,” and an ethical system based not on “rules,” but on character, judgement, and the virtues. “Moral particularism,” then, is a “secular ethics” that is based more in practice than in theory; it’s also one that Jollimore concedes “shares some important common ground with religious tradition.” (Copied from the NYT)
Jollimore's full essay entitled 'Godless but good' can be found here
Sunday, September 1, 2013
Art and Religion VIIII: "Art is a Religion"
Sasha Chaitow, PhD candidate at the Center for the Study of Myth at the University of Essex, has posted some translations of L’Art Idealiste et Mystique by Joséphin Péladan.
Here is the translated 'Exhortation':
Artist, you are a priest: Art is the great mystery and, if your effort results in a masterpiece, a ray of divinity will descend as on an altar. Artist, you are a king: Art is the true empire, if your hand draws a perfect line, the cherubim themselves will descend to revel in their reflection. Spiritual design, a line of the soul, form of understanding, you make our dreams flesh. Artist, you are a mage: Art is the great mystery, it only proves our immortality.
Read more Here
Here is the translated 'Exhortation':
Artist, you are a priest: Art is the great mystery and, if your effort results in a masterpiece, a ray of divinity will descend as on an altar. Artist, you are a king: Art is the true empire, if your hand draws a perfect line, the cherubim themselves will descend to revel in their reflection. Spiritual design, a line of the soul, form of understanding, you make our dreams flesh. Artist, you are a mage: Art is the great mystery, it only proves our immortality.
Read more Here
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