CDs are Dead

CNN has an article asking, "Is the death of the CD looming?"

Uh...is there some uncertainty about that? Do you know how many CDs I've bought since we got the iPod?

Zero. Zilch. None.

Why would we want to buy physically bulky, easily scratched CDs when we can have 1,000 songs on a portable device?

It isn't a question of whether or not the CD will die, it's simply a matter of when.

Soon they will be as rare as vinyl, 8 tracks, and those annoying cassette tapes that I used to have so many of.

Hasta La Vista, CDs.

The next music media revolution will be an implant that allows us to directly download music into our brain.

That'll be freakin' awesome!

Cancer Survival

I don't constantly think about the fact that I had cancer. Well, that's not exactly true. I think about it everyday in tangential ways. I have physical reminders that I see everyday. I have to take a pill everyday. I frequent a particular breast cancer bulletin board fairly regularly, at this point to offer support or answer questions more than seeking support for myself.

However, thinking of myself as an active cancer patient is not something I do. I pretty much feel like I am over the crisis of cancer and its treatment. It doesn't have any immediate, urgent hold over me.

I do sometimes wonder about what will happen 20 years down the road because the type of cancer I had was one that likes to recur many years later and, in fact, the more years that pass by the higher my individual risk of recurrence becomes. That is mainly a result of my age and the fact that my cancer was hormone positive. If I had been 55 at diagnosis, 20 years later would put me at 75 and chances are that I would be dealing with other health issues, and even if I wasn't, I might only have another 10 years or so of life expectancy.

Being diagnosed at 34 skews the picture somewhat. 20 years from my diagnosis I'll only be 54. 30 years later, only 64....no spring chicken by any means, but by today's standards, still a relatively vital age and young time to die. Of course, recurring doesn't mean that I would die from cancer. There are people who successfully fight cancer multiple times and beat it.

So what's got me thinking about all this?

One of the posters on the bulletin board I frequent died this past week. This happens on a regular basis because although many people will deal with breast cancer only once, there will always be some who will develop metastasis and eventually pass away. Even with good odds, someone represents the bad odds. If 90%-95% of women with my type of cancer never develop metastasis, there is always someone who is in the 5%-10% of those who will.

Being a part of a breast cancer community bears this out.

Communicating with many other women about breast cancer turns one into a mini-expert, supplemented with the PhD. in medicine that most of us earn from Google University. You start to learn the differences between triple negative cancer, hormone positive cancer, Her2+ cancer, and all the different treatments that people get and why they get them.

You also learn statistics; how particular statistics impact you or don't. It's easy to start to feel as if you have a talisman of knowledge that soothes and comforts you. You hear of someone who develops mets and then see that their cancer had worse characteristics than yours, or that they were diagnosed at a later stage, or with a larger tumor.....all things which are extremely relevant to the stats game.

It's easy, as an early-stage survivor with good stats, to gain a sense of, "Well....that's scary, but it probably won't happen to me." Maybe that's even necessary for healthily overcoming fear or worry.

However, every once in a while your little good stats bubble will burst.

Like this week when the woman who passed away had almost identical stats as me....same stage, same grade, almost identical hormone responsiveness...and actually her stats were slightly better, being completely node-negative while I had those stupid Isolated Tumor Cells in 2 of my nodes. She had no lymphovascular invasion and I did.

She was diagnosed with cancer at 33. I found my lump while I was 33.

She developed bone mets within a year or two of her diagnosis, and then it eventually progressed.

It kind of took the wind out of my sails and downgraded the power of my talisman.....because there is no known reason why things should have played out that way for her....which in turn means there is no known reason why they shouldn't play out that way for me.

One of the wise things a now deceased member of the bulletin board reminded us, right after another hard-to-understand, defiance-of-the-good-stats passing of a member, was that we shouldn't write ourselves into other people's stories. Each person had their own story and it was theirs alone.....so no matter how similar we might seem to others, it didn't mean we had the same story or outcome.

It was true then, and it is still true now.

Money and Value

I wanted to put out some of my thoughts about The Money Fix. I enjoyed the program immensely and learned a few things I hadn't known before, but one of the most interesting parts was the realization that our money has gone post-modern on us.

This thought has occurred to me before, usually while I am trying to explain to my kids what a debit card is and how we pay for things. I am one of those people who very rarely carries cash. I have been known to use my debit card to buy a soda at a gas station, or buy a couple stamps at the post office. In fact, the only time I carry cash is when I am driving long distances and need money for tolls. For everything else, I use my debit card.

Money, for me, has become a ledger of credits and debits. Our paychecks are electronically deposited. Our bills are paid electronically online.

It's a little dizzying to think about. I go to the store and they move some numbers from my bank account to theirs. They use those same numbers to pay their bills and their employees. Those employees leave work and swap some of those numbers for a hamburger and fries, and then switch some more electronic numbers for a tank of gas.

All this can happen in a single day, and yet what has really happened in this scenario? When we cash a paycheck, actual, hard copy cash is not moved from the large bank in Fort Lauderdale that backs up the paycheck. When I buy groceries no physical cash is moved from the bank to the store. And when the store pays its employees, there is no physical movement of money from their bank to the employee. Those numbers can be turned into cash, if the employee opts to cash their check instead of depositing it, but the cash they receive is just a physical representation of a line of transactions that threaded their way through the state, zig-zagging from place to place electronically until someone decided to turn their electronic number into a physical reality.

It's uncomfortable to realize that if everyone decided to turn their electronic numbers into cash, there wouldn't be enough cash to take the place of the electronic numbers. So then, what do all of those electronic numbers represent if they don't represent actual physical objects?

I mean what is money, anyway? Just some paper with pictures and numbers on it. The only reason it has any value is because we all agree to follow the rules of the monetary system and attribute the individual worth of a particular piece of paper as determined by its markings.

Someone will say,"But the paper is just a stand-in for actual money, like gold." However, that's not true because our money hasn't been on a gold standard since the seventies. Many conservatives want the US to go back to a gold standard, and many people still see gold as a reliable form of wealth, but the dye has been cast and it will never be possible to go back to a gold standard, because there simply is not enough gold to back up the monetary system, not only of our country, but also the monetary systems of other countries.

People who worry about the devaluation of money have been buying gold, and even silver, and stockpiling it as form of true wealth, which is why gold prices have sky-rocketed over the past year and why we have to endure all those Cash 4 Gold commercials on TV. Here's something to think about, though: What makes gold a form of true wealth? Do we value it because it's pretty? Because it makes some nice jewelry?

There are some industrial uses for gold in electronics, but for the most part, gold is a vanity or luxury product. It isn't especially useful.

What would happen if gold lost its luster in the eyes of most people? It would lose its value.

Any form of wealth is only as valuable as the value that people agree to assign to it, and it isn't inconceivable to imagine a time when the utility of a resource, in its relation to people, becomes a measure of its value.

Humans decide what is valuable, sometimes based on supply and demand and sometimes because of the psychology or perception of the market.

We see the direct effects of this principle everywhere, especially here in Florida where our real estate market has plummeted to the bottom of the barrel. Houses have lost enormous amounts of their value, not because they are any different than they were three years ago, but because how valuable a house is has less to do with how the house is constructed and more to do with uncontrollable, abstract ideas.

Is the house in a desirable location? Are there good schools nearby? Are there jobs in the area for people? Do people want to live there?

The answers to those questions have little to do with the actual house and more with the usefulness of what living in that house will provide people; convenience, a pleasant living experience, and proximity to other things that people value.

Value is a property that is in the complete control of human wishes and desires, ranging from the completely necessary to the bizarrely superfluous.

I'll continue more of this later.

Panhandling

Panhandling has become a commonplace practice in the neighborhood where we live; not the neighborhood exactly, but the busy intersections nearby. The subdivision we live in is relatively close to a mall, shopping centers, hardware stores, etc. and these businesses attract high numbers of people and make easy pickings for panhandlers. Over the last four or five years the occasional, lone panhandler has blossomed into pairs of panhandlers. The every-once-in-a-while panhandler has turned into the-almost-constant-fixture panhandler.

This phenomenon doesn't seem to be focused in our particular location. As part of the job I have, I drive throughout our county on a daily basis during the school year and almost every busy streetlight is manned by one person or another with a sign describing their predicament, asking for money and invariably ending with "God Bless". I've seen one woman in a business skirt and heels darting between stopped traffic with a sign plastered with pictures of her younger brothers who she needed help caring for. I've seen signs advertising the panhandler's status as a veteran. I've seen signs saying that the panhandler really needed a drink.

Today, while leaving Wal-Mart, a young couple was panhandling with this sign:

College Graduates

Rent Past Due

Almost Homeless

God Bless

For whatever reason, their sign did not inspire my pity. The sight of young, able-bodied people turning to panhandling as a way to pay the rent didn't incline me to be sympathetic. DH joked that maybe it was an experiment for their sociology class to see what sort of response they would get.

Panhandling usually invokes the twin powers of suspicion and guilt within me; suspicion because I have a sense that most panhandlers are simply manipulating people for money and guilt because I feel as if I should be more kind and generous in my appraisal of them and my response to them. These two feeling usually see-saw back and forth within me, causing me sometimes to avoid the panhandlers and sometimes to give money to them.

While sitting at a red light at one of the frequent panhandling intersections near our home, I watched a man walking up the sidewalk. He was muscular and somewhat fit. His clothes were slightly bedraggled and his face was covered with rough stubble. He eventually reached the intersection, plopped down an army green duffel bag and pulled out a cardboard sign. It said he was an injured, homeless veteran from Iraq.

He proceeded to work the lanes of stopped traffic with a limping, hobbling gait, one that was nowhere to be seen a minute earlier when I had watched him approaching on the sidewalk. I shook my head in frustration and made a point to remember him so that I wouldn't get suckered if he happened to become a frequent fixture.

DH is much more zen about the whole thing. His feeling is that we have no way of picking out the "deserving" panhandlers from the non-deserving panhandlers so he'll just give them a small amount of money, maybe a few dollars, and not worry about it. I tend to wonder if giving money to panhandlers encourages the wrong type of people to continue panhandling.

The panhandlers sometimes become more bold and instead of passively standing at an intersection, they'll directly approach and ask for money, like the lady who struck up a conversation in the cereal aisle while I was shopping one day. A brief question about whether a particular brand of cereal was any good became long litany of the troubles she was facing; legal troubles, the water being shut off, feeding her fourteen-year-old, her unemployed spouse. I offered her some information, directing her to food pantries that I knew of and free clinics for medical help which also offer social services, taking advantage of the water and electric company's charity care. Every piece of information I gave her was met with an excuse about why she "couldn't" go here or there.

Financially I wasn't in a position to help her. I didn't have $80 free to pay her water bill, or $100 to buy her groceries. I didn't even have cash in my purse at the time, because I almost always use my debit card and hardly ever have actual paper money on me. Sensing that I couldn't give her what she wanted or needed, she moved on. I finished my shopping and then spotted her, this time with her husband/boyfriend(?) near the checkout line. I paid for my things, and got $10 in cash from the cashier and caught her on my way out of the store. She seemed genuinely grateful and I left not knowing whether I had been gullible or kind....or both.

Having my kids with me when these things happen tends to make me be more generous and more cautious. Not wanting to make my children cynics, like myself, I try to go out of my way to be more generous. On the other hand, having them with me when someone approaches me directly also makes me very uncomfortable because I have no idea how erratic a panhandler might be, and what their response will be if I don't have money to give to them.

How do you handle panhandlers? Do you respond differently if you have children with you?

Thunderclan Roll!!

The Rationalist and The Intuitive are both avid readers. Going to the library usually ends in bringing home stacks of books and a few anime DVDs, like Yu-Gi-Oh....or the very bizarre Dragon Ball...which I still can't believe they watched and enjoyed. It was right on the cusp of being a little too bizarre for them to have my permission to watch it, but I think most of the bizarreness went over their heads.

They enjoy the grand, epic style of cartoons like Yu-Gi-Oh which pit the forces of good against evil and which have a continuous story-line that builds throughout the series. Japanese series have a knack for that type of story-building and mythology-making that most Western cartoons don't develop nearly as well. Most Western-style cartoons tend to have more stand-alone episodes and tend to keep only a thin thread of mythology running through the series.

Currently, I am being pestered by my children to read the Warriors books, a series of books about warring cat clans. It sounds a little weird...but they love it. They read each book and discuss it afterwards. They run around outside pretending to be from warring cat clans. They talk about the special terminology used in the books. They whisper about the parts I haven't read yet, so as not to spoil the surprise. They talk about the twist and turns in the books.

In short....they love these books.

These books do the same thing that a good anime series does; they develop a consistent, ongoing, mythical story-line while incorporating adventurous battles and intrigue.

So...if you have a child in the upper elementary grades, or lower if they're advanced readers, give the books a try.

Link Love

I've read several posts from all corners of the blogosphere...um...ok...more like from the narrow list of blogs in my Google Reader....and I found several worth highlighting.

James ponders whether his spiritual life is one of Journey or Rest. His last paragraph really resonated with me.

Doug Chapin, aka clayboy, continues a conversation spurred by his skeptical maxim:

The rationality of a sceptic’s argument is inversely proportional to the strength of their attack on faith.

An interesting exchange took place, leading him to ponder whether Reason was God's practical joke.

Assistant Village Idiot compares multi-site churches and the mega church tendency to have song lyrics superimposed over pictures of doves, oceans, mountains, etc....to Orthodox iconography providing a Window Into Heaven.

Tyler Cowen, of Marginal Revolution, interacts with the article in The New York Times about cryonics, otherwise known as freezing your body, or head, in the hopes that technological advances made in the future will allow you to be thawed out and brought back to life.

While writing that out I just had a terrible image of 27th century, highly advanced people thawing out all these old, frozen heads and reanimating them only to give them to their children as pets. There's got to be a bad sci-fi movie in that idea...or maybe an episode of The Twilight Zone!

Sabio, from Triangulations, takes a poll on people's personal policies of violence. Some interesting conversation takes place between atheists and Christians. I didn't vote....but maybe I will after I've thought about it more.

Summing It Up

What is Money?

I caught the last half of a show on PBS, The Money Fix. Before I write anything about it, I will give the upfront warning that there is a lot of very liberal woo involved in the documentary, but eschewing that, it was fascinating.

Here's a clip from the movie:

Another explanation:

So...the entire monetary system is almost like a pyramid scheme of debtors.

I'm going to think about this for a while before I post my thoghts

Blogger Problems

Hmmm...I'm having problems with comments appearing on the blog. I added one as a test and it is also not showing up.

If you left a comment and it isn't "there"...it's not because I deleted it! ;-)

I'll wait and see if they eventually show up. Blogger has been very buggy with its comment feature lately.

In Search of a Tribe

I started this post at the beginning of June and never finished it. Now, my longing for a tribe has only been made more intense.

I have been in a pattern of complete avoidance regarding the church we've been attending for the last couple of years. In the past six months I have probably only been to church about four, or five, times. Working on my father's house almost every weekend kept me out of town and gave me an excuse not to think about it too much.

You see, our family never quite recovered from leaving the church we attended for many years on the heels of some crazy goings on. We hid out in a mega-church for a couple of years, never quite connecting because of the sheer size of the congregation and the fact that our lives and schedules didn't mesh with the opportunities provided; DH worked late and we didn't have extra money to spare for a regular babysitter in order to attend evening small groups.

We settled where we are now simply because we had been looking for a new, smaller church when I was diagnosed with breast cancer. There were a few things we liked about the church, but mainly we realized that we needed to settle down somewhere because we weren't up for the emotional ups and downs of church shopping while I was going to have to go through surgeries and chemo.

We managed to get through that year and were just starting to try and get involved when the pastor was changed, apparently at the congregation's request. There were issues that we didn't know much about because we were relatively new and didn't have any idea about the inner workings of the church.

A new pastor was eventually appointed.

The new pastor actually was quite nice. He was older, had better organized and meaningful sermons, and I could tell that he was educated at a high theological/biblical studies level. It turned out he had been a professor at a Methodist University for some time.

I liked him, but then my life got busy and those 6 months of absenteeism took over. I had been planning on trying to talk with him about some things when the announcement came down that he was retiring and a new pastor would be taking his place in a couple of weeks.

This has just thrown me back into a mental limbo with regard to the church. We have no idea what this next guy will be like, and it stinks that this church will be on its third pastor in two years.

Almost five years have passed since things disintegrated at the church we used to love, and we are still just as disconnected and uncertain as ever.

*******

Well...I guess I know what the new guy's like now.

Sunday was the new, new pastor's first day on the job. I'm thinking staying at this church just might be untenable for me. We were already putting up with sub-optimal feelings about staying here, and now I just don't see it working.

The newly appointed pastor has much more enthusiasm than we have seen in the last two pastors, but it seems to be focused in a culture war direction. Besides the God and Country sermon we were treated to on Sunday, we had to hear the typical "America turning away from God" points...because apparently the fact that West Point no longer requires its students to attend chapel is a sign of the coming destruction of the United States.

Actually, mandatory chapel attendance was dropped from West Point in 1973, over 37 years ago. Here I am, in 2010, listening to a preacher quote this fact, minus the date, as if it just happened recently. This is a sign of the culture wars. It doesn't matter that the battle was lost almost 40 years ago. Somehow, it still is relevant to the state of the world and our Christian piety in 2010.

I can't do this. I can't go Sunday after Sunday listening to someone who wants to stir everybody up about irrelevant, outdated facts and use it as a goad to make people "live better" or "transform our country". The worst part about the service wasn't even that the new pastor went this route, but that many of the members were amen-ing him.

The church we attend has two services. An early morning, contemporary service and a traditional service. We attend the early service because we like it better and because we are mostly morning people.

Having two services has stratified the congregation. The contemporary service has lower attendance but is more diverse; young families, older couples, middle-aged couples. The traditional service is twice as large and completely unbalanced demographically. There are no children in the traditional service, mainly because everyone who attends that service is about 60 or older. They are very traditional in every sense of the word.

We've known about this stratification for some time, but we were happy to hang out in the early service .

I realized on Sunday, because the services were combined into one single service, why the first pastor had likely been dismissed. The larger part of the congregation wanted someone like this new pastor. They wanted a culture warrior, a shouter, a guilt-user in leadership over them. I had seen glimpses of this in the church newsletters, which were occasionally filled with the same type of intonation, but I had brushed it aside because there are always people in any given church who you might find disagreeable, or whose opinions you really don't like, but you choose to ignore for the sake of peace, or simply because one person's opinion is inconsequential in the grand scheme of things.

Now, I am seeing that this runs deeper than a few older people who are set in their ways.

DH and I have talked about this endlessly, unsure about what to do. We have stuck around at this church because some of the people are nice and our kids feel very welcome and enjoy attending there. Also, we haven't wanted to jerk the kids around from church to church trying to find something that may not even exist; the perfect church for us.

I, personally, am really struggling with this, partly through my own "fault", though I think the term "fault" is a misnomer. I have spent too much time studying, thinking, and rethinking my faith to be comfortable in a church like this. I can't listen to some yahoo who just makes things up, or slants things in particular ways to suit his own agenda.

What is the point of me going to a church like that?

I shouldn't consistently leave a church stewing and feeling beleaguered.

The Unwitting Dissemination of Error

Today the new pastor of our church quoted Benjamin Franklin amid a mixed bag of Fourth of July, God and Country, overused tropes, complete with towering flag behind a tiny metal cross.

I was not amused.

Whenever Christians quote the Founding Fathers, especially in support of a sermon or idea, I remain highly skeptical of their use of that quote. So often these particularly prescient quotes about God and Country are taken out of context, or portrayed in ways that aren't true to the particular person who spoke them. Considering that many of the founding fathers were Deists, their points about God, while often eloquent and full of beauty, are meant in entirely different ways than they are appropriated by Christians.

In the midst of trying to verify this particular quote, I came across something that I found more interesting; Benjamin Franklin's letter to Thomas Paine, author of the rebuttal of Christianity and promotion of Deism, The Age of Reason:

I have read your manuscript with some attention. By the argument it contains against a particular Providence, though you allow a general Providence, you strike at the foundations of all religion. For, without the belief of a Providence that takes cognisance of, guards, and guides, and may favor particular persons, there is no motive to worship a Deity, to fear his displeasure, or to pray for his protection. I will not enter into any discussion of your principles, though you seem to desire it. At present I shall only give you my opinion that, though your reasons are subtle, and may prevail with some readers, you will not succeed so as to change the general sentiments of mankind on that subject, and the consequence of printing this piece will be, a great deal of odium drawn upon yourself, mischief to you, and no benefit to others. He that spits against the wind spits in his own face.

But were you to succeed, do you imagine any good would be done by it? You yourself may find it easy to live a virtuous life, without the assistance afforded by religion; you having a clear perception of the advantage of virtue, and the disadvantages of vice, and possessing a strength of resolution sufficient to enable you to resist common temptations. But think how great a portion of mankind consists of weak and ignorant men and women, and of inexperienced, inconsiderate youth of both sexes, who have need of the motives of religion to restrain them from vice, to support their virtue, and retain them in the practice of it till it becomes habitual, which is the great point for its security. And perhaps you are indebted to her originally, that is to your religious education, for the habits of virtue upon which you now justly value yourself. You might easily display your excellent talents of reasoning upon a less hazardous subject, and thereby obtain a rank with our most distinguished authors. For among us it is not necessary, as among the Hottentots, that a youth, to be raised into the company of men, should prove his manhood by beating his mother.

I would advise you, therefore, not to attempt unchaining the tiger, but to burn this piece before it is seen by any other person, whereby you will save yourself a great deal of mortification by the enemies it may raise against you, and perhaps a great deal of regret and repentance. If men are so wicked with religion, what would they be if without it?

There are loads of things in this letter that I wanted to blog about, and probably will at some point, but before I could get to that things became quite curious. While still searching for a primary source for the quote from church, I came across this same letter on several different sites. One of them mentioned that it was falsely attributed as being written to Thomas Paine when, in reality, it had been written in 1757 to an unknown recipient...years before Franklin and Paine had known one another and years before The Age of Reason had been written.

Moments like these reveal how utterly uncertain we can be when researching things online, or even in books for that matter, when we don't have access to the primary sources that are quoted or attributed to people.

How could I know which sites were correct about this letter? How could I discern which sites might be more credible and trustworthy than others?

Those two questions are frequently underutilized online...if utilized at all.

I spent about an hour typing in variations of search terms about Franklin, Paine, and the online availability of Franklin's works. Surely in this day and age I should be able to find an answer about this. Franklin was one of the most prolific writers/inventors/thinkers of his time. There should be reams of documentation about him and multiple levels of redundancy online with regard to his writings.

I was surprised that it took an hour instead of 5 minutes.

Time and again, I found this letter described as being written to Paine. I found it on quasi-religious, patriotic sites accompanied by self-satisfied commentary that Paine was buried in a field because no American cemetery would take his blasphemous body. I found it on sites declaring that they were supplying primary source documents. I found it on Wikipedia's article on Benjamin Franklin. I found it on an atheist forum.

Over and over it showed up, in various contexts, and with various agendas.

Eventually, I found another site--franklinspapers.org--, with Franklin's collected works, which also supplied the now dubiously dated and addressed letter. It was listed under the earlier date of 1757 with the anonymous addressee. Considering this site was sponsored by The American Philosophical Society, a society founded by Benjamin Franklin, and also sponsored by Yale University.....I finally felt as if I had found a reputable, trustworthy source.

The letter was not written to Thomas Paine. Despite the popular-level, frequent attestation that it was written to Paine....it wasn't. Despite the fact that it wouldn't be hard to imagine it as a response to The Age of Reason, it wasn't. Despite the fact that many used this as proof that Franklin was on their side of religious belief, against Paine's Deism and rejection of The Bible, it wasn't.

Discovering examples of the unwitting dissemination of error is disconcerting and the two-edged sword of the Internet age. It's easy to read something, post an article quoting it, which in turn gets quoted by another site, which eventually serves as a reference for a blog post which ignites a spirited discussion, which takes the quoted material for granted and spins off innumerable comments and blog responses.

All without anyone realizing that the quoted attribution and context are completely false.

And...epistemological certainty takes another blow.

Conversations I Can't Win

After whiny, complaining, outraged speeches directed at yours truly from The Rationalist concerning the unfairness of letting The Intuitive play Wii first.....I sent him to his room.

Me: "I told you that was enough. If you don't quit fussing about it you'll have to go to your room and complain about it there."

The Rationalist: "But I asked before we even went to church this morning. I-"

Me: "That's it!...Go to your room!"

After a few minutes in his room spent caterwauling, complaining and pouring out his grievances to himself and God, I guess...he came out.

The Rationalist, finally calm and composed: "Can I come out of my room, now?"

Me: "Only if you're done complaining, fussing and yelling about how life is so awful and unfair to you."

The Rationalist, in a deadpan voice with a sigh as he plopped himself down on the couch: "OK. But, you know...life is actually unfair sometimes."

Knowing and Believing

It doesn't make any sense but we all know what Earl is talking about.

Humanity's Belief

A few weeks ago I came across this chart on someone's blog:

It's made the rounds here and there to bolster the argument that science and studying science doesn't make one an atheist. Usually, this comes up in the discussion of Creationism and Evolution.

What I found most striking, however, was the large correlation with studying the humanities and social sciences and the drop-off in religiosity for people in those fields.

My initial stab at explaining this is to posit that science is about facts while the humanities are about ideas. And nothing is quite as disturbing to one's own preconceived notions as encountering other people's well-argued, preconceived notions.

While scientific discoveries can lead to people re-evaluating their religious beliefs, it is usually not at the hands of scientists that we falter and rethink our assumptions, but at the hands of people who try to integrate those scientific discoveries into far-reaching ideas.

Those people tend to be writers, philosophers, social scientists....in other words, people who dabble in the humanities.

Most students arriving as freshman have only been exposed to a basic sweep of ideas and a general overview of literature and philosophy. Plunging deeper into that pool will naturally expose students to ideas they have never considered or arguments that are more powerful than what they have gotten at home.

On the negative side, it only takes one or two confident, authoritative professors to completely undermine a student's wavering faith....and humanities professors are more prone to see it as their duty to strip away and challenge their students' ideas.

Science professors are more concerned with teaching their students the facts and theories of their particular fields. While a science professor might spout off his or her theist/atheist philosophy in the midst of a class, it isn't the main subject, or even relevant to a student's understanding of how DNA works.

A humanities professor, on the other hand, has a much more powerful position because they work in the trade of explaining concepts and ideology through Literature, or Philosophy, or History, or Language, etc. Completing a humanities course and getting a good grade will inevitably involve regurgitating an interpretation of a particular text or idea that meets with the professor's approval.

Anyone who has ever had a terrible humanities professor, or perhaps better put, a biased humanities professor, can testify to how frustrating it can be.

I recall one Dr. Stanley who gave me my first ever D on a World Lit. test because he didn't like my answers. I was mortified and a little outraged because I felt that the answers he marked wrong, weren't wrong. I was shocked until I heard that almost everyone else had failed the test. I had to take him again the next year for European Lit. The first test gave me a C+. Once again everyone else did worse than me....and these were small classes filled with bright students, many of them smarter than me. However, we had run up against a professor who was certain of his interpretation and wasn't open to anyone else's. We survived the only way we could....by giving him what he wanted, even if we didn't believe it ourselves.

Dr. Stanley wasn't very charismatic, so he didn't win any converts to his ideas, but it isn't hard to see how if he had been more charismatic he might have been able to convince everyone to take a particular view of the subject matter, especially if it had been about something more substantial than literature.

BTW....this isn't an indictment of all Humanities profs.

So...no hate mail...OK!? ;-)

Every year, the weekend after school gets out, we take a trip to the beach to celebrate. I especially wanted to get there early this summer because I'm not sure what's going to happen in the Gulf over the next few months.

One simulation seems to keep the Tampa Bay area relatively safe from the effects of the spill...but those estimates are only taking currents into account, not the possibility of Tropical Storms or Hurricanes coming our direction from the west of the Gulf, which occasionally does happen when one slides past Cuba, into the Gulf and hovers there for a little while before deciding where it wants to go.

In other words....who knows what the heck is going to happen?

So far our favorite beach has remained pristine and we even saw a pod of 3 dolphins coming up for air.

We'll probably head to the beach as often as we can, trying to take advantage of what we have before it might be gone.