Prothero Attacks “Intelligent” Design

David Prothero just recently his new book, “Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters”, in which he takes off the kid gloves and really hits the creationist/intelligent design movement hard. Some of his arguments are just priceless. He really hits the “intelligent” part of intelligent design, suggested that humans are, in fact, poorly designed.

For example, human backs and feet are not meant for bipedalism, male nipples serve no functional purpose, nor does the appendix, and the human genome is full of non-functioning DNA.

My Booklist to Find Out More About Christian Fascism in America

After finishing Chris Hedges’ American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, I’m even more curious than I already was about the rise of Christian Reconstructionist thinking in America. I’ve put together the following reading list for myself to find out more:

• America’s Providential History
• Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army
• The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam
• The Origins of Totalitarianism
• Thinking Points: Communicating our American Values and Vision

What do you think? Any books I should add to the list?

Sometimes I feel like Curtis Sittenfeld Has Been Reading My Diary

Novelist Curtis Sittenfeld writes so convincingly from the perspective of a neurotic woman surrounded by people for whom life seems so much easier that sometimes I think she’s been reading my diary. The thought processes and behavior patterns of her characters are so familiar that it’s possible she’s even reading my mind.
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Life Lessons from Albus Dumbledore: Death is an Adventure

Lesson 3: “After all, to the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.”

Andy has often told me that he would become immortal if given the chance. He doesn’t like the idea of dying without knowing whether or not there is an afterlife.

I’m a bit more circumspect about the whole thing. I’m not confident that there is an afterlife. In any case, I feel that it’s my responsibility to live as if there were no afterlife. Because if this life is all I’ve got, I should try to get as much out of it as I can.

But even if there is no afterlife, I would still not select immortality. Why? Because this life would become boring and torturous if we lived it forever. What’s more, death is the only thing that sustains continued life on this planet. If we could choose to never die, but also to never see a newborn baby, what would we say?

Would we really give up fresh and hopeful new life simply because we are afraid of the unknown? I certainly would not.

Life Lessons from Albus Dumbledore: It is Our Choices That Show What We Truly Are

“It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.” After Harry learns that he is a parselmouth — that is, he can speak to snakes — he begins to worry that he is a dark wizard. After all, Voldemort was a parselmouth. So was Salazar Slytherin.

I’ve been given countless opportunities to sew discord where harmony once prevailed. I’ve even been sorely tempted a time or two. Most of the time, I feel like I’ve taken a relatively respectable path.

Like most people, I’m capable of doing some truly terrible things. But our choices define us, not what we might or might not do.

Life Lessons from Albus Dumbledore: It Does Not Do to Dwell on Dreams…

In honor of the seventh and final installment of Harry Potter, I’ve decided to share all the wonderful things the series has taught me. As I was going through all the meaningful bits of wisdom, it became clear to me that J.K. Rowling uses Professor Dumbledore as her mouthpiece to sum up the big lessons of each of the books.

Lesson One: “It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.”

When Dumbledore catches Harry on one of his late night trips to stare into the fabled Mirror of Erised, he cautions him against becoming too enthralled with the images he sees there. The mirror shows the viewer whatever he secretly desires most. Most of all, Harry wants to see himself flanked by his proud parents, who were killed by the dark wizard Voldemort when he was just a baby.

In this imperfect life, it’s much too easy to dwell on what might have been. It’s too easy to look back on all the things that went wrong and say, “if only.” But as Professor Dumbledore cautions Harry, we are given but one life. There is no sense in dwelling on the paths that did not unfold before us. We must try to walk the path ahead.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

I finished my first reading of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and am getting ready to embark upon a second read-through. This is what I do with all Harry Potter books. I tear through them as quickly as I can for the major plot points, then re-read more slowly and try to answer my remaining questions and disappointments by paying attention to detail.

Spoilers after the jump.
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Order of the Phoenix Was Not Worth Staying Up Until 3:00 a.m.

It seems that whenever J.K. Rowling writes a book more than 500 pages in length, the movie version inevitably sucks. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix — which I saw with Andy and friends at midnight last night — felt so utterly thrown together. There were many places where the filmmakers departed from the tremendous depth of storytelling in the book and relied on stupid contrivances to hold together what was little more than a sequential re-enactment of the most visually stimulating moments from the book.

Here are just a few of the many issues I had with the film:

1. The first chapter was all wrong. The book starts off with an ennui-ridden Harry spending the summer in Little Whinging without a shred of news about the return of Voldemort. His frustration and anger at his wizarding friends, and the massive unfairness of life with the Dursleys sets the tone for the rest of the book, in which Harry is a first-class prat a good deal of the time — as teenage boys are prone to be.

   The movie took away all of that underlying motivation and went straight into the scene in which Harry and his horrible cousin are attacked by dementors. They don’t mention that Mrs. Figg is a squib. They don’t mention anything about Mundungus Fletcher going off after dodgy cauldrons. Rowling sets the whole rising action up so brilliantly in the book. The movie could have done it justice with just a couple extra minutes of screen time.

2. Fudge’s motivation for not believing Voldemort is back is all wrong. They don’t explain until halfway through the movie that Fudge isn’t simply in denial because You-Know-Who was so terrible. His true motivation in the book is his fear and jealousy of Dumbledore’s popularity and brilliance. This pops out unexpectedly with no set-up halfway through the film.




3. Umbridge isn’t nearly evil enough. Actress Imelda Staunton got the false, girlish sweetness down pat. But her performance did nothing to demonstrate the truly evil nature of this woman. In the book, I seethed right along with Harry at the injustice of Umbridge’s rise to power at Hogwarts. In the film, her role was so one-dimensional that she didn’t make me angry at all.
4. No Quidditch. And no “Weasley is our King” either.
5. Nothing about Ron and Hermione being prefects.
6. No Marietta Edgecombe. Instead, Cho Chang is the traitor, and there’s nothing about veritaserum in the book. And no brilliant Hermione’s enchanted parchment.
7. The Weasley’s departure was quite lackluster. No everlasting swamp in the corridor.

I could go on about the many reasons why this movie didn’t live up to the book, but those were the big ones. I don’t think they should be making films of these books at all if they can’t do them right.

Will Twinkies and TV Bring Down America the Way Bread and Circuses Brought Down Rome?

Americans today have a better standard of living than any other group of people at any time in history. Thanks to venture capital and innovation, we have such comforts as air conditioning, pillow-top mattresses, birth control pills and iPods. When we have a headache, we take an over-the-counter non-steroidal anti-inflammatory. If we sneeze from pollen or mold, an anti-histamine does the trick.

When our ancestors were hungry, they ate roots and berries. Today, we consume sugary, packaged snacks. And when we crave entertainment we watch television rather than picking up a book. As Theodore Roosevelt once feared, we have become “over-civilized.” We care more for our comforts than sacrifice. We care more for empty images flickering on a screen than we do for discourse.

That’s the claim at the center of Al Gore’s new book The Assault on Reason. I’ll confess that I’m barely into it, but already I think it’s going to be a read on par with Andrew Sullivan’s The Conservative Soul.

One of the most striking aspects of Gore’s book so far is the way he uses neuroscience to explain what is happening to our country, particularly with regard to the amount of television we watch:

The parts of the human brain that are central to the reasoning process are continually activated by the very act of reading printed words…Television, by contrast, presents to its viewers a much more fully formed representation of reality — without requiring the creative collaboration that words have always demanded…

Neil Postman, said, “Every technology has a philosophy which is given expression in how the technology makes people use their minds, in what it makes us to with our bodies, in how it codifies the world, in which of our senses it amplified, in which of our emotional and intellectual tendencies it disregards. This idea is the sum and substance of what the great Catholic prophet Marshall McLuhan meant when he coined the famous sentence ‘The medium is the message…’ “

When a new technology emerges as the primary medium for the sharing of information — like the printing press in the fifteenth century or television in the twentieth century — those who adapt to the new technology have to literally change the way they process information. As a result, their brains may actually undergo subtle change. When millions of people experience the same changes simultaneously in the course of a few decades, their interactions with on another begin to take new forms.

An individual who spends four and a half hours a day watching television is likely to have a very different pattern of brain activity from an individual who spends four and a half hours a day reading. Different parts of the brain are stimulated repetitively.

When you consider that the average American spends about 30 hours a week watching television — almost a full work week — you start to realize why we could have elected such a dullard as president. A nation that cannot reason cannot elect a sensible leader. A nation that cannot reason cannot develop any kind of real discourse about national decisions.

A nation that is too anesthetized by television and twinkies to reason at all can do nothing to save itself from ruin. I fear that America has reached that precipice. I hope that I’m wrong.

Andy has a different perspective, which I hope he will share with us in the comments. I promise you, it’s far more uplifting than mine.

A Harry Potter Theme Park!!

Apparently, the newest island at Universal Studios’ Islands of Adventure will be “The Wizarding World of Harry Potter”.

The park is set to feature Hogsmeade village, the enchanted forest and Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. I’m not exactly thrilled that Diagon Alley isn’t on the short list of environments, but I’m definitely planning a trip to Orlando once this opens.

In fact, I think I’d really kind of like to work there. At least for a while. Can’t you just see me swooping around playing an eccentric witch who has lost her cat/broomstick/wand?

Blaming Women

Some of you expressed interest in reading my junior English paper on the character of Eve in Milton’s Paradise Lost.

In the interest of discouraging plagarism of the paper, I’ve exported and uploaded it as a PDF. I’ve also reverted it to rough draft form in a few key places. Anyone who steals this paper will likely miss at least one or two mistakes, thus lowering their grade. Be forewarned.

Here it is.

Why Mommy is a Blithering Idiot

The book Why Mommy is a Democrat is chock full of interesting images like the one at left where a rich couple tosses a coin to a homeless guy in the background while an anthropomorphized mommy squirrel tells her children “Democrats make sure we all share our toys, just like Mommy does.”

Am I the only person who looks at that picture and thinks, “that homeless guy needs to get a job?”

Ideology aside, does this book disturb anyone else? Why associate this with a particular political party? Why not “Why Mommy is a Liberal” or “Why Mommy Likes to Tax and Spend” or “Why Mommy Thinks the Government Can Fix Everything” instead? Why focus on the political party instead of just supporting a particular ideology? What this book says to me is that the author cares more about partisan indoctrination than he does about passing along his values to kids.

Via Best. Lesbian-ish. Week. Ever.

Stumbling on Happiness

Stumbling on Happiness is full of interesting facts about the reasons that human beings are so bad at determining what will make us happy in the future. Basically, our brains are terrible at interpreting information with any real accuracy. This goes for information memories of the past, sensations from the present and imagination of the future. Numerous scientific studies have demonstrated the various mechanisms by which we delude ourselves, and Gilbert relates them with wit and sagacity.

But don’t read this book with the hope that it will teach you how to make yourself happy. It will not. It will only tell you why humans are so terrible at finding what we seek.

From this book, I concluded that happiness is a necessary piece of the human condition. It bolsters our will and keeps us strong. Unexpected pockets of joy can leaven even the most difficult times. But happiness is not an end in and of itself. When we make happiness our goal, we can not help but be disappointed because we are terrible at figuring out what will truly make us happy.

Instead, humans should seek other worthwhile goals such as fairness, helping others, speaking truth to power, creating beautiful things or working toward justice. When happiness comes to us, we should savor it and enjoy it with gratitude. But we should not seek it for its own ends, nor should we pursue it relentlessly at the expense of being good, just or true.

The Same Old Men…

I was watching the coverage of President Ford’s passing today on television and noticed something striking: our country has been run by the same old men for a long time. Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and Brent Scowcroft–to name a few–served in some capacity in the Ford administration.

And Ford’s running mate in his 1976 bid for the presidency? Bob Dole.

Perhaps we need some new, young blood in this country. Maybe Barak Obama is the answer. He’s largely untested, but he’s young and he has some long overdue fresh ideas. My in-laws gave me his The Audacity of Hope as a Christmas gift, so I’ll check it out and report back about whether I think he’s up to the task. I’m starting to think that this is a distinct possibility.

What A Life Without Religious Certainty Means to Me

This past Thanksgiving, I was sitting around the dinner table with the Christian side of my family before the meal. My cousin offered up a prayer to Jesus for grace. As we were all tucking in to the delicious food, my brother asked, “what does Jesus have to do with Thanksgiving?”

Surprisingly enough, I had an answer. “Jesus,” I said, “was unbelievably charismatic. He was so charismatic that some people believe he was God in the flesh. He had extraordinary power over people. He could have used that power for anything: money, women, fame, conquest. But he used it to tell people to love one another and be kind to one another. That’s something everyone can be thankful for, Christian or not.”

My uncle looked up at me and said, “maybe there’s hope for your heathen soul after all.” And we all laughed.

I wasn’t being cute when I answered my brother’s question. I really do appreciate the words of Jesus. Even if I didn’t appreciate them, I would have had to come to terms with them at some point. It seems like they’re being used everywhere these days, sometimes to justify things that he arguably would have found abhorrent.

I recently finished Lauren Sandler’s Righteous: Dispatches from the Evangelical Youth Movement. One of the central arguments of the book is that fundamentalists crave the certainty that comes when you get all your answers about life from an external, predetermined source. In the final chapter of her book, she makes an impassioned plea for non-fundamentalists everywhere to share why not being a fundamentalist lends meaning and purpose to their lives, in order to offer an alternative to the safe confines of religious certainty.

This also happens to be a central argument to Andrew Sullivan’s fabulous The Conservative Soul. Sullivan explains that conservatism is comfortable with uncertainty. A conservative should be able to rely on the muddled compass that is his conscience because he has no better tool to determine the correct course of action. He is not comfortable with giving his life over to an externally imposed set of acceptable morals and behaviors because he knows that his own ability to perceive the truth or falsity of any of these diktats is inhibited by his humanity.

This is what a life without religious certainty means to me. It leaves me free to change my mind about things. It is what allowed me to drift along the political spectrum from knee-jerk liberal to thoughtful moderate. It is what allows me to be comfortable with who I am, instead of trying to conform to a set of rules that don’t work for me. It allows me to grow from experience. Sure, it’s scary to not have all the answers. But no matter how certain you think you are about the truth of reality, life has a way of blindsiding you with possibilities you hadn’t ever considered. I feel that it’s better to be ready for the unexpected than to be certain of exactly what the future holds.

If you’re looking for a false sense of security and safety, then look no further than fundamentalism. But if you’re ready to embrace the world in all of its mysterious elegant frustrating complexity, then start questioning everything you read. Think critically about everything you hear. Examine people’s motives for saying things, rather than just taking what they say at face value. See how far it can take you. Start with this blog post.

Books I Really Want to Read

It’s so interesting how I finally discovered my own intellectual curiosity post-college. Until now, it always seemed like the books everyone thought I should be reading clashed significantly with the books I wanted to be reading.

Now, that’s changed in one of two ways: either the books I want to read and the books people want me to read are the same, or I don’t give a shit what people think I should be doing anymore.

My sidebar tells you all about what I’m reading, plus what I just finished and what I thought of it. But here, dear readers, I will disclose to you what I want to read.

• Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies - Jared Diamond
• Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond
• The Mighty and the Almighty: Reflections on America, God, and World Affairs - Madeline Albright
• The Year of Magical Thinking - Joan Didion
• Prozac on the Couch: Prescribing Gender in the Era of Wonder Drugs - Jonathan Michel Metzl
• Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show - Geoffrey Nunberg
• No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam - Reza Aslan
• From Beirut to Jerusalem - Thomas Friedman
• The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 - Lawrence Wright
• Righteous: Dispatches from the Evangelical Youth Movement - Lauren Sandler
• Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design - Michael Shermer
• The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture - John Battelle

Incidentally, John Battelle is speaking at our conference in just a couple of weeks. I can’t wait to meet him!

If you want to buy me any of those books, feel free. E-mail me at tsv02001 [at] gmail [dot] com and I’ll send you a mailing address where you can send. I’ll even thank you personally and link to your blog :-). I have a PageRank of 5 now! Yay!

Ooh, and while I’m at it, I might as well mention that I’m just dying to see Jesus Camp and Half Nelson.

But no, you can’t take me to the movies. Just what kind of girl do you think I am?

In Search of Sizemore

One of my favorite books for keeping around the house is Cathy Alter’s Virgin Territory: Stories from the Road to Womanhood. It’s great for picking up when there’s a bit of free time and nothing else to read.

I was paging through it today during an idle moment and I read a story by Betty, a now 36-year old drummer. It was about her first kiss:

He smoked. He played hooky. He was the ype your mom and dad warned you about. He was my brother’s friend, two years older than me and twice as wide. He was really, really fat. Enormous. And I kid you not, his last name was Sizemore. He gave me my first kiss…

I was in fifth grade, and we had just moved to the country. I rode the bus to school. It was the kind of bus where the kids in the back cranked AC/DC and “Highway to Hell” sounded warped and warbly because the batteries were always about to run out. They played it louder than the little speakers could handle, so it sounded all distorted too, like a muffled principal’s announcement coming across the public address system. Kids ran wild, hopping from seat to seat, gossiping, and punching, and pinching.

I was sitting reading The Hobbit when Sizemore yelled, “Hey Betty! Get over here!” So I went over and asked what he wanted. I was scared.

He made me sit on the inside, and he trapped me against the wall of the bus. It was a hot day to begin with, and his huge body pressing into me made me sweat. I cound’t breathe. He told me to give him a kiss. So I did like he said.

His stringy black hair hung down around my face, his fat engulfed my skinny body. But his lips were soft and wet.

I kissed him twice before we pulled up to my house. I raced off the bus, insane, not knowing what I was feeling I ran into my room and shut the door. Then I looked at myself in the dressor mirror and told myself, “I kissed a boy…uh, hey, I have a boyfriend!”

I packed up my stuffed animals, my Barbie dolls, and my glitter stickers, crammed them into a Glad trash bag, and tossed them out onto the curb. Only girls play with toys, and I was all grown up.

He never kissed me again, and I was too timid to approach him. In any event I forgot about him in a week, missed my toys, and wished I still had them. I went back to thinking about horses and saving to buy an Easy Bake Oven.

I heard later that he got religion and went around carrying a Bible and preaching to sinners at shopping malls.

The story made me wonder if Betty and Sizemore ever met up again. If he ever explained to her why he wanted to kiss her on the bus on that hot day. I wonder if Sizemore even knows that Betty wrote about him for her contribution to Alter’s book.

Sometimes I think there are mysteries in life that need explanations. I wonder if Betty still wonders about Sizemore just because she doesn’t understand what he was thinking, or why that kiss had such a dramatic effect on her own image of herself as a grown up.

I hope that someday Sizemore will Google himself, find this post, seek out Betty, and tell her.

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