Happy Holidays!

I hope everybody is having an enjoyable and happy holiday season.

There Is No Hell

I recently heard a This American Life broadcast about Carlton Pearson, who was officially branded a heretic by the Pentecostal leadership because he started preaching that there is no Hell (although he is now an ordained mainline Protestant minister). Preaching the idea of no Hell is, of course, heresy because it's clearly stated in the Bible. His reasoning is that the world is full of people who are either suffering immensely or living peaceful, generous, and holy lives who will never hear about Christianity, and therefore will never have a choice to become Christians. This means God explicitly allows people to be born knowing that they will go straight to Hell when they die with no possibility of redemption. Not very nice to think about, huh. But these are the things that Christians must agree to when they become "believers". Same with homosexuality being a sin. Or tattoos. The Bible clearly states it, so Christians must believe it, and trying to be more socially acceptable is really just going against fundamental Christian ideas, however progressive it might sound. This is also one of the reasons I became an atheist. Since I really can't pick and choose what parts of Christianity I agree with, I have to give it up.

By the way, following up on my previous post today, this stuff counts as evidence for morality and ethics derived apart from the Judeo-Christian tradition that would naturally arise in an atheism-based system of morality. To Carlton Pearson I might suggest that if there is no Hell and everybody goes to Heaven, is it even necessary to believe in God? Can't we just be good people?

Aimee Mann Christmas Special

You'd think somebody who writes primarily depressing songs to hate Christmas, but Aimee Mann loves it. This is the third year she's put on a live Christmas special, and this year I decided to go. It was really fun and more like a variety show than just a concert. They had a spoof on A Christmas Carol. Paul F. Thompkins did some stand up (and his debut CD is hilarious too). Grant-Lee Phillips did a hilarious impression of Willie Nelson singing Voices Carry (he even had Nelson's characteristic delayed singing down perfect). Nellie McKay was funny and sang a few very good songs. Kirsten thinks she has a good voice. I disagree, but I think she's a very entertaining jazzy performer and wouldn't mind seeing her solo act. The whole evening gave me the same feeling as watching White Christmas. It was alot of fun.

Morality Without God

I don't think alot of people watch the Terminator show on FOX, but on the last episode they introduced an interesting dilemma--How do you teach a robot to value human life? In the show, of course, they use the existence of God to justify morality and ethics. If God created life in his image, then it must be valuable, with all the ethical ramifications of that. However, how would an atheist approach the problem? It's a common fallacy that Christians assume that morality and ethics cannot cannot arise in an athiest worldview. On the contrary, considering what we know about how humans and their brains operate, athiests can easily create a contemporary moral system. Humans are social creatures, and society relies on give-and-take, which leads to a "Golden Rule". However, this is based on human-human interactions. We know our value and can understand the value of others. We could even apply this reasoning to animals or aliens because we are all carbon-based life forms (and we hope the aliens agree so they won't destroy us with their superior technology). But robots and AI are completely different entities. How do we convince them that human life is special without positing the existence of God?

Import Complete!

It's taken me about 3 months, but I've finally finished importing all my EndNote references into Zotero. All 333 of them. Whenever I had some free time I would go through the imported references and add DOI numbers and PDFs, mainly by going to the journal website and re-downloading all the info with one click (much easier than typing in missing information) and then deleting the original database entry.

The Truth is Out There

Kirsten and I began a trip down memory lane this weekend by starting to watch the first season of The X-Files. I was really into the show in high school, and I remember watching the first four episodes. Unfortunately, I don't think I can give an unbiased opinion about them. I still think the show is great from the get-go.

In other news, the pottery sale/holiday party went really well, although only one person asked for one of my hot toddies.

More Human than Humanities

Occasionally I will listen to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast. It's an interesting show, but I can only take so much of his way of speaking and tone of voice. Anyway, in the last show he interviewed Victor Davis Hanson about Classical studies in the U.S. Hanson believes that study of the Classics of Greek and Roman literature are essential, and that the decrease in the emphasis of Classical Studies is leading to an unhappy and uneducated populous. He recently wrote a blog post about it where discusses the negative ramifications of the modern menu-based system of liberal undergraduate education and the rise of christian universities. Based on his interview and his writing, he has a few reasons for thinking this way:

1. Mandatory Classical Studies created a common curriculum for all students. It meant an emphasis on learning language and fixed systems for knowledge building and art.

2. Classical Studies emphasizes inductive reasoning over deductive reasoning, meaning "let's look at particulars and create a worldview around them" or "If something happens over and over, it will always happen again." Deductive reasoning, on the other hand, generally begins with a general premise and arrives at conclusions, like our modern scientific method.

3. Classical Studies emphasizes the limitations of humans in the face of Nature and Fate.

4. Classical Studies are always relevant because basic human characteristics never change.

Now I disagree with Hanson's premise, because "Western" culture was basically reset after the Middle Ages and is currently being rewritten in the Information Age. Here are my rebuttals:

4*. Human nature is constant, so the Classics will always be relevant, but are not always applicable. We always have to interpret Classical ideas or debates through a modern filter in order to apply them to current ideas and debates. This adds effort and error to the applicability of Classics to the modern.

3*.We understand how Nature and the universe works so much better than the Greeks and Romans that it makes a large portion of Classical Studies irrelevant. At this point we're trying to get our heads around how we are indirectly destroying our own home planet, not the other way around. We understand a large amount of cause and effect, and can effectively avoid disasters.

2*. I agree that critical thinking skills are abysmal in the U.S. But the argument that inductive reasoning is more important or more valid than deductive reasoning is ridiculous. They are simply forms of logic--tools, not ethics--and they lead to different types of knowledge. We use both every day, whether we realize it or not. And different areas of study have their own tools that are useful, so why regulate a single way of reasoning?

1*. If you really want a common curriculum to tie all educated citizens together, why does it have to be the Classics? You could just as easily select a varied curriculum that are more applicable to modern situations. And why emphasize learning dead languages? Why not learn Spanish to understand the subtleties of Jorge Luis Borges, or French to understand the intricacies of Barthes? These are both languages that are extremely useful today.

I'm a fan of the modern liberal education, where the student gets to choose their core classes. Yes, they typically go for the easy A, no-brainer courses like "Rocks for Jocks" and "Math for Trees" and the ubiquitous "Human Sexuality". But remember that one of the largest fallacies of the ancient philosophers was the idea that there could be one holistic system of knowledge that works for everybody. Well, everybody is different. The population is a bell curve. There are different types of learning and not everybody responds to them in the same way. What works for some will most certainly not work for another. This is why we need a choice so that those truly interested in their education and future can excell to their highest potential.

I will say, though, that I like how Victor Davis Hanson hates poststructuralism:

If Marx receded from economics departments, his spirit reemerged among our intelligentsia in the novel guises of post-structuralism, new historicism, multiculturalism, and all the other dogmas whose fundamental tenet was that white male capitalists had systematically oppressed women, minorities, and Third World people in countless insidious ways. The font of that collective oppression, both at home and abroad, was the rich, corporate, Republican, and white United States.

There was victim status for everybody, from gender, race, and class at home to colonialism, imperialism, and hegemony abroad. Anyone could play in these “area studies” that cobbled together the barrio, the West Bank, and the “freedom fighter” into some sloppy global union of the oppressed—a far hipper enterprise than rehashing Das Kapital or listening to a six-hour harangue from Fidel.

Unfortunately this quote came from a screed explaining how our liberal education system ultimately led to 9/11 and how President Bush's policies are reversing that trend.

Zotero Style

A little while back I mentioned an open source reference software called Zotero. As I said before, the gathering and storing of references works perfectly, but that's only half of what a good reference manager does. The second is facilitating citations and bibliographies during writing. Right now, I'm working in earnest on my next journal article and I'm using the Zotero plugin for Word. It seems to be working well, except that there is no defined reference style for the particular journal I am writing for: Earth and Planetary Science Letters. So of course I took the opportunity to learn Citation Style Language and create my own style file. It was much more difficult than I expected, but I finally got it formatting my citations and bibliography the way they should. So if anybody wants my CSL file, shoot me an email.