Without A Scalpel

For many people of different faiths, cutting up a corpse to figure out how a person died is an invasive, even offensive, procedure.

In some cases, as with Muslims and Jews, autopsies may violate their religious laws.

But technology companies are stepping in with a more acceptable alternative to traditional autopsies, using sophisticated scanning and three-dimensional computer systems.

Silicon Graphics Inc. manager Afshad Mistri demonstrated one such system on a recent morning in Mountain View, standing in front of a theater screen displaying the fuzzy image of a woman who was killed in a car accident in Sweden.

Another SGI engineer moved the cursor across the corpse, revealing the next layer, an image of the woman's skeleton clearly showing her broken bones...more here

Fascism then. Fascism now?

Observing political and economic discourse in North America since the 1970s leads to an inescapable conclusion: The vast bulk of legislative activity favours the interests of large commercial enterprises. Big business is very well off, and successive Canadian and U.S. governments, of whatever political stripe, have made this their primary objective for at least the past 25 years.

Digging deeper into 20th century history, one finds the exaltation of big business at the expense of the citizen was a central characteristic of government policy in Germany and Italy in the years before those countries were chewed to bits and spat out by fascism. Fascist dictatorships were borne to power in each of these countries by big business, and they served the interests of big business with remarkable ferocity.

These facts have been lost to the popular consciousness in North America. Fascism could therefore return to us, and we will not even recognize it. Indeed, Huey Long, one of America's most brilliant and most corrupt politicians, was once asked if America would ever see fascism. "Yes," he replied, "but we will call it anti-fascism."

By exploring the disturbing parallels between our own time and the era of overt fascism, we can avoid the same hideous mistakes. At present, we live in a constitutional democracy. The tools necessary to protect us from fascism remain in the hands of the citizen. All the same, North America is on a fascist trajectory. We must recognize this threat for what it is, and we must change course...more here

Is God is Nothing

Is God is nothing more than an attempt to explain order and good fortune by those who do not understand the mathematics of chance, the principles of self-organizing systems, or the psychology of the human mind? When the study I just described was accepted for publication, I recall asking one of my collaborators, who is a deeply religious man, how he felt about having demonstrated that people can misattribute the products of their own minds to powerful external agents. He said, "I feel fine. After all, God doesn't want us to confuse our miracles with his."

That's fair enough. Science rules out the most cartoonish versions of God by debunking specific claims about ancient civilizations in North America or the creatio ex nihilo of human life. But it cannot tell us whether there is a force or entity or idea beyond our ken that deserves to be known as God. What we can say is that the universe is a complex place, that events within it often seem to turn out for the best, and that neither of these facts requires an explanation beyond our own skins...more here

The Problem of Evil

Some claim that only the intellectually defective can fail to be impressed by the inconsistency between belief in the existence of the theistic God and the recognition of suffering in our world – especially given the quantity and intensity of human suffering. An omniscient, omnipotent, omni-benevolent God would not allow his beloved children to suffer, and certainly not as often or as intensely as they do. A good God would not permit evils to relentlessly afflict human life within His creation. The ubiquity of suffering renders belief in the perfect God of theism irrational. So say anti-theistic proponents of the problem of evil...more here

The Second Space

-The Soul Hovering Over the Body-

The heavenly halls are so spacious!
Ascend to them on stairs of air.
Above white clouds the hanging celestial gardens.

A soul tears away from the body and soars.
It remembers that there's up and down.

Have we really lost faith in a second space?
They've dissolved, disappeared, both Heaven and Hell?

Without unearthly meadows how will one meet salvation?
Where will the gathering of the damned find its abode?

Let us weep, lament the enormous loss.
Let us smear our faces with coal, disarrange our hair.

Let us implore, so that it is returned to us,
The second space.

Czeslaw Milosz

Intelligent design fight demeans religion

WASHINGTON - Because every few years this country, in its infinite tolerance, insists on hearing yet another appeal of the Scopes monkey trial, I feel obliged to point out what would otherwise be superfluous - that the two greatest scientists in the history of our species were Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, and they were both religious.

Newton's religiosity was traditional. He was a staunch believer in Christianity and member of the Church of England. Einstein's was a more diffuse belief in a deity who set the rules for everything that occurs in the universe.

Neither saw science as an enemy of religion. On the contrary. "He believed he was doing God's work," wrote James Gleick in his recent biography of Newton. Einstein saw his entire vocation - understanding the workings of the universe - as an attempt to understand the mind of God.

Not a crude and willful God who pushes and pulls and does things according to whim. Newton was trying to supplant the view that first believed the sun's motion around the earth was the work of Apollo and his chariot, and later believed it was a complicated system of cycles and epicycles, one tacked on upon the other every time some wobble in the orbit of a planet was found. Newton's God was not at all so crude. The laws of his universe were so simple, so elegant, so economical, and therefore so beautiful that they could only be divine.

Which brings us to Dover (Pa.), Pat Robertson, the Kansas State Board of Education and a fight over evolution that is so anachronistic and retrograde as to be a national embarrassment.

Dover distinguished itself this Election Day by throwing out all eight members of its school board who tried to impose "intelligent design" - today's tarted-up version of creationism - on the biology curriculum. Pat Robertson then called down the wrath of God upon the good people of Dover for voting "God out of your city." Meanwhile in Kansas, the school board did a reverse Dover, mandating the teaching of skepticism about evolution and forcing intelligent design into the statewide biology curriculum.

Let's be clear. "Intelligent design" may be interesting as theology, but as science it is a fraud. It is a self-enclosed, tautological "theory" whose only holding is that when there are gaps in some area of scientific knowledge - in this case, evolution - they are to be filled by God. It is a "theory" that admits that evolution and natural selection explain such things as the development of drug resistance in bacteria and other such evolutionary changes within species, but that every once in a while God steps into this world of constant and accumulating change and says, "I think I'll make me a lemur today." A "theory" that violates the most basic requirement of anything pretending to be science - that it be empirically disprovable. How does one empirically disprove the proposition that God was behind the lemur, or evolution - or behind the motion of the tides or the "strong force" that holds the atom together?

In order to justify the farce that intelligent design is science, Kansas had to corrupt the very definition of science, dropping the phrase " - natural explanations for what we observe in the world around us," thus unmistakably implying that the supernatural is an integral part of science. This is an insult both to religion and to science.

The school board thinks it is indicting evolution by branding it an "unguided process" with no "discernable direction or goal." This is as ridiculous as indicting Newtonian mechanics for positing an "unguided process" by which the Earth is pulled around the sun every year without discernible purpose. What is chemistry if not an "unguided process" of molecular interactions without "purpose"?

He may be, of course. But that discussion is the province of religion, not science. The relentless attempt to confuse the two by teaching warmed-over creationism as science can only bring ridicule to religion, gratuitously discrediting a great human endeavor and our deepest source of wisdom precisely about those questions that lie beyond the material.

How ridiculous to make evolution the enemy of God. What could be more elegant, more brilliant, more creative, indeed more divine than a planet with millions of life forms, distinct and yet interactive, all ultimately derived from accumulated variations in a single double-stranded molecule, pliable and fecund enough to give us mollusks and mice, Newton and Einstein? Even if it did give us the Kansas State Board of Education too.

Charles Krauthammer writes for the Washington Post Writers Group, 1150 Fifteenth St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20071. His e-mail address is letters@charleskrauthammer.

Is atheism dying?

Science & Theology News asked some leading thinkers to share their views about the future of atheism...more here

Science needs God. Or does it?

Do you believe in God?

Some leading thinkers have strong opinions about God, while others are reserving judgment ...more here

Book of the Month

From the Publisher

A magisterial work of social history, Life After Death illuminates the many different ways ancient civilizations grappled with the question of what exactly happens to us after we die.

In a masterful exploration of how Western civilizations have defined the afterlife, Alan F. Segal weaves together biblical and literary scholarship, sociology, history, and philosophy. A renowned scholar, Segal examines the maps of the afterlife found in Western religious texts and reveals not only what various cultures believed but how their notions reflected their societies’ realities and ideals, and why those beliefs changed over time. He maintains that the afterlife is the mirror in which a society arranges its concept of the self. The composition process for Judaism, Christianity, and Islam begins in grief and ends in the victory of the self over death.

Arguing that in every religious tradition the afterlife represents the ultimate reward for the good, Segal combines historical and anthropological data with insights gleaned from religious and philosophical writings to explain the following mysteries: why the Egyptians insisted on an afterlife in heaven, while the body was embalmed in a tomb on earth; why the Babylonians viewed the dead as living in underground prisons; why the Hebrews remained silent about life after death during the period of the First Temple, yet embraced it in the Second Temple period (534 B.C.E. –70 C.E.); and why Christianity placed the afterlife in the center of its belief system. He discusses the inner dialogues and arguments within Judaism and Christianity, showing the underlying dynamic behind them, as well as the ideas that mark the differences between the two religions. In a thoughtful examination of the influence of biblical views of heaven and martyrdom on Islamic beliefs, he offers a fascinating perspective on the current troubling rise of Islamic fundamentalism.

In tracing the organic, historical relationships between sacred texts and communities of belief and comparing the visions of life after death that have emerged throughout history, Segal sheds a bright, revealing light on the intimate connections between notions of the afterlife, the societies that produced them, and the individual’s search for the ultimate meaning of life on earth.

On Cheerful Books

I am an unabashed reader of books: all kinds of books -- good books and bad books, well-written and ill-written; books with a purpose, and books whose existence only the nicest sophistry could justify; books created by genius, and books built by talent standing on its head to attract attention; I even read books made to sell. I can and do read at all times and in all places -- standing up, and sitting or lying down; in chair or bed; on trains and 'buses or boats; in houses, gardens, theatres (when the play is dull); at concerts (reading to music is a discovery and not nearly so offensive to the musicians as talking to music); at meals (this is a delight which deserves an essay to itself) -- in short it would not be easy to name time or place inappropriate to the indulgence of this habit; and yet with all its catholicity and its complete indifference to the feelings of others, I can say with that self-satisfaction which comes only to those who admit being addicted to at least one habit which is no use to anyone but themselves that I could never bring myself to anything approaching enjoyment of an intentionally cheerful book. Cheerful books, or shall I say "cheery" books, make me sad: professional optimism reduces me to ashes.

Holbrook Jackson, On Cheerful Books

My November Guest

My Sorrow, when she's here with me,
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
She walks the sodden pasture lane.

Her pleasure will not let me stay.
She talks and I am fain to list:
She's glad the birds are gone away,
She's glad her simple worsted gray
Is silver now with clinging mist.

The desolate, deserted trees,
The faded earth, the heavy sky,
The beauties she so truly sees,
She thinks I have no eye for these,
And vexes me for reason why.

Not yesterday I learned to know
The love of bare November days
Before the coming of the snow,
But it were vain to tell her so,
And they are better for her praise.

Robert Frost, My November Guest

100 things

100 things that make us scream
After meticulous research, we have determined the 100 things that most make you quiver like a schoolgirl..more here

Violence/Desire

"Tell me what you don't like about yourself." That's the introductory line delivered to potential patients by the popular team of plastic surgeons, Sean McNamara (Dylan Walsh) and Christian Troy (Julian McMahon), in FX's hit series, Nip/Tuck. With its explicit sexual content, including partial nudity and a penchant for threesomes, its depiction of the blood and guts of plastic surgery, and its violent confrontations between characters, Nip/Tuck approaches territory usually reserved for pay cable channels. Woven into its soap-opera plot lines is the suggestion of a hidden link between sexual license and the technological project of remaking the human body in light of individual wishes; indeed, the show depicts a deep connection between both of these and raw violence. The show's creator, Ryan Murphy, calls it a "modern day horror story with the plastic surgeons as dueling Dr. Frankenstein's."...more here

Evil and redemption at the box office

A tremendous depiction of evil," is the way William Peter Blatty, author of the best-selling novel The Exorcist, describes Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, a film whose astonishing box-office success — it is now the highest grossing R-rated film ever and has just broken into the domestic all-time top-ten list — has surprised its fans and baffled its critics. Because it is an unprecedented film in so many ways, film critics and cultural pundits, at least those who have not mindlessly dismissed it as a snuff film, have been groping to put The Passion in some sort of comparative context.

On account of the controversy it has aroused, the film has been compared to Scorsese's Last Temptation of Christ, but the reception of that film matched critical acclaim with box-office indifference, thus making it the inverse image of The Passion. Classic Hollywood religious films, even those that are not afflicted with what Gibson calls "bad hair" and "bad music," provide no benchmark whatsoever. The New Republic's Stanley Kauffman had to go all the way back to Gone with the Wind (1938) to find comparable pre-release buzz about a Hollywood film. But that was not an R-rated religious film with dialogue in Aramaic and Latin...more here

Evidence that demands a verdict

For some, the existence of evil is one of the great arguments against the existence of God; for others, it is one of the great arguments in his favor. Many films about demonic possession and exorcism fall into the latter camp, and the film that defines this genre more than any other is, of course, William Friedkin's The Exorcist (1973). Based on the bestselling novel by William Peter Blatty, it draws a strong contrast between modern scientific rationalism—depicted as cold, harsh, and mechanical, a view of the world that reduces body and mind to a mere collection of parts—with a more traditional worldview that boldly affirms the supernatural. Ironically, while there is something dehumanizing about the medical treatment that a possessed young girl is subjected to, the demonic possession itself affirms her personhood, as well as the reality of a mysterious unseen world beyond what science can prove or explain. And Blatty's original novel makes a point of linking the cosmic conflict to more familiar forms of evil, reminding us that evidence of this spiritual battle is before our eyes all the time. The novel begins with a page that cites the Holocaust, the persecution of Christians, and similar examples of real-world cruelty, as if to say, Why do we need a "sign" such as demonic possession in order to believe that this struggle is real?...more here

Tears, Idle Tears

Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.

Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,
That brings our friends up from the underworld,
Sad as the last which reddens over one
That sinks with all we love below the verge;
So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.

Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns
The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds
To dying ears, when unto dying eyes
The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;
So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.

Dear as remembered kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feigned
On lips that are for others; deep as love,
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;
O Death in Life, the days that are no more.

Alfred Tennyson - Tears, Idle Tears

A LITTLE OF THIS & A LITTLE OF THAT

A Little Question: If ignorance is bliss, why aren't more people happy?

A Little Quip: Support bacteria... it's the only culture some people have!

A Little Wisdom: A hug is a great gift, one size fits all. It can be given for any occasion and it's easy to exchange.

A Little Quote: "Until the day of his death, no man can be sure of his courage." -- Jean Anouilh (1910-1987), French playwright.

Sorrow

The whole order of things fills me with terrible anguish, from the tiny gnat to the mysteries of incarnation. All is entirely unintelligible to me -- particularly myself. Great is my sorrow, without limits. None knows my sorrow except God in Heaven, and He cannot have pity.

Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) Danish Existentialist philosopher