Benny Hinn and Upton Sinclair

Saw this via Pam Spaulding this morning.



Coincidentally, I was glancing over this bit from Upton Sinclair's The Profits of Religion last night.

It is a vision I have seen: upon a vast plain, men and women are
gathered in dense throngs, crouched in uncomfortable and
distressing positions, their fingers hooked in the straps of
their boots. They are engaged in lifting themselves; tugging and
straining until they grow red in the face, exhausted. The
perspiration streams from their foreheads, they show every
symptom of distress; the eyes of all are fixed, not upon each
other, nor upon their boot-straps, but upon the sky above. There
is a look of rapture upon their faces, and now and then, amid
grunts and groans, they cry out with excitement and triumph.

I approach one and say to him, "Friend, what is this you are
doing?"

He answers, without pausing to glance at me, "I am performing
spiritual exercises. See how I rise?"

"But," I say, "you are not rising at all!"

Whereat he becomes instantly angry. "You are one of the
scoffers!"

"But, friend," I protest, "don't you feel the earth under your
feet?"

"You are a materialist!"

"But, friend, I can see--"

"You are without spiritual vision!"

And so I move on among the sweating and groaning hordes. Being of
a sympathetic turn of mind, I cannot help being distressed by the
prevalence of this singular practice among so large a portion of
the human race. How is it possible that none of them should
suspect the futility of their procedure? Or can it really be that
I am uncomprehending? That in some way they are actually getting
off the ground, or about to get off the ground?

Then I observe a new phenomenon: a man gliding here and there
among the bootstrap-lifters, approaching from the rear and
slipping his hands into their pockets. The position of the
spiritual exercisers greatly facilitates his work; their eyes
being cast up to heaven, they do not see him, their thoughts
being occupied, they do not heed him; he goes through their
pockets at leisure, and transfers the contents to a bag he
carries, and then moves on to the next victim. I watch him for a
while, and finally approach and ask, "What are you doing, sir?"

He answers, "I am picking pockets."

"Oh," I say, puzzled by his matter-of-course tone. "But--I beg
pardon--are you a thief?"

"Oh, no," hie answers, smilingly, "I am the agent of the
Wholesale Pickpockets' Association. This is Prosperity."

"I see," I reply. "And these people let you--"

"It is the law," he says. "It is also the gospel."

I turn, following his glance, and observe another person
approaching--a stately figure, clad in scarlet and purple robes,
moving with slow dignity. He gazes about at the sweating and
grunting hordes; now and then he stops and lifts his hands in a
gesture of benediction, and proclaims in rolling tones, "Blessed
are the Bootstrap-lifters, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven."
He moves on, and after a bit stops and announces again, "Man doth
not live by bread alone, but by every word that cometh out of the
mouth of the prophets and priests of Bootstrap-lifting."

Watching a while longer, I see this majestic one approach the
agent of the Wholesale Pickpockets' Association. The agent greets
him as a friend, and proceeds to transfer to the pockets of his
capacious robes a generous share of the loot which he has
collected. The majestic one does not cringe, nor does he make any
effort to hide what is going on. On the contrary he cries aloud,
"It is more blessed to give than to receive!" And again he cries,
"The laborer is worthy of his hire!" And a third time he cries,
yet more sternly, "Render unto Caesar the things which are
Caesar's!" And the Bootstrap-lifters pause long enough to answer:
"Lord have mercy upon us, and incline our hearts to keep this
law!" Then they renew their straining and tugging.

I step up, and in timid tones begin, "Reverend sir, will you tell
me by what right you take this wealth?"

Instantly a frown comes upon his face, and he cries in a voice of
thunder, "Blasphemer!" And all the Bootstrap-lifters desist from
their lifting, and menace me with furious looks. There is a
general call for a policeman of the Wholesale Pickpockets'
Association; and so I fall silent, and slink away in the throng,
and thereafter keep my thoughts to myself.

[...]

Excepting possibly the last-mentioned group, the priests of all
these cults, the singers, shouters, prayers and exhorters of
Bootstrap-lifting have as their distinguishing characteristic
that they do very little lifting at their own bootstraps, and
less at any other man's. Now and then you may see one bend and
give a delicate tug, of a purely symbolical character: as when
the Supreme Pontiff of the Roman Bootstrap-lifters comes once a
year to wash the feet of the poor; or when the Sunday-school
Superintendent of the Baptist Bootstrap-lifters shakes the hand
of one of his Colorado mine-slaves. But for the most part the
priests and preachers of Bootstrap-lifting walk haughtily erect,
many of them being so swollen with prosperity that they could not
reach their bootstraps if they wanted to. Their role in life is
to exhort other men to more vigorous efforts at self-elevation,
that the agents of the Wholesale Pickpockets' Association may ply
their immemorial role with less chance of interference.

I haven't, as they say, Read The Whole Thing, but that's a pretty marvelous little bit of writing, even if I did trim it down a tad. I'm reading Sinclair's Oil! right now, and will do a full booklog on it soon, but it's full of the kind of perspective you see here.

(A historical note, apropos of nothing here: Libertarian hero Robert Heinlein was deeply involved in Upton Sinclair's 1934 campaign for governor of California. Granted, this is before Heinlein became a science fiction author and before he turned more right-wing during World War II, but it's an interesting little factoid, isn't it?)

Umm, maybe there's some subtlety I'm missing...

I found this link over at Slashdot (where the discussion seems to be pretty much on-par with the kinds of ignorant rantings you see at Slashdot whenever evolution -- actually, science in general -- comes up). Here's the post in total.

ScienceDaily (Jan. 18, 2008) — According to Darwin’s theory of evolution, individuals in a species pass successful traits onto their offspring through a process called “deterministic inheritance.” Over multiple generations, advantageous developmental trends – such as the lengthening of the giraffe’s neck – occur.

An opposing theory says evolution takes place through randomly inherited and not necessarily advantageous changes. Using the giraffe example, there would not be a common neck-lengthening trend; some would develop long necks, while others would develop short ones.

Now, the findings of an international team of biologists demonstrate that evolution is not a random process, but rather occurs through the natural selection of successful traits. The collaborative study by researchers at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Israel, the U.S, France and Germany is published in the November 2007 issue of Current Biology (vol. 17, pp. 1925-1937).

To settle the question about whether evolution is deterministic or random, the researchers used various tools – including DNA strand analysis and electronic microscopy – to study female sexual organ development in 51 species of nematode, a type of worm commonly used to better understand evolutionary processes.

When the researchers measured changes in 40 defined characteristics of the nematodes’ sexual organs (including cell division patterns and the formation of specific cells), they found that most were uniform in direction, with the main mechanism for the development favoring a natural selection of successful traits, the researchers said.

“Since random development would not create such unifying trends, we concluded that the observed development was deterministic, not random,” said Professor Benjamin Podbilewicz from the Technion Faculty of Biology.

The findings, which constitute a significant milestone in establishing and reaffirming the mechanism of Darwin’s theory, will help in understanding how evolution works in all living creatures, said Podbilewicz.

And, in other news, water is wet? I mean, a science publication saying that new experiments have proven the Theory of Evolution correct is a bit like one with the banner headline: "Newton vindicated: larger objects have more gravitational pull than smaller ones!" It's an obvious nonresult, because no one's arguing that smaller objects have gravity equal to or greater than larger objects.

Likewise, so far as I know, no biologist argues that evolution is a _completely_ random process, but that randomness allows for mutations and selection occurs on those populations. Either this is a totally trivial result, or there's some evo-devo controversy buried in here that is completely steamrolled over by the article, 'cause otherwise this is a total "dog bites man" result.

Abortion and compromises

Over at Pandagon, Amanda Marcotte has a really nice post about Abortion as a First Amendment issue. I'm going to cut and paste a substantial portion of her post since it's so good, but I'm snipping out a bunch, so go read the whole thing for context.

I had always heard soundbites that Keenan was walking around talking about the “moral complexity” of abortion, and it got my back up against the wall, because I heard that to mean “the people who think abortion is killing have a point”, and I don’t actually think this is an issue that’s painted in shade of gray. “Shades of gray” only comes into the equation for me when actual, feeling beings are killed or forced to suffer for reasons that are understandable,* but as fetuses are unfeeling balls of flesh that have brain activity far below the sort of animals we thoughtlessly kill in animal shelters and farms every day, I find there to be no complexity. In a battle between what is still technically a feeling-free parasite on a woman’s body and a living, breathing, feeling woman, the latter wins hands down, and there’s no complexity or shades of gray there.**

But when I listened to Keenan elaborate on “moral complexity”, I realized she wasn’t conceding that anti-choicers had a point. She was saying more that the people in the mushy middle feel like they’re in a moral quandary about abortion, because it’s all mixed up with various other issues about sex, commitment, self-image, family, ickiness, and other touchy subjects and thus most people refuse to really think the issue through and come to the correct conclusion: Anything so complex and personal should be a matter of personal conscience. The term “moral complexity” is a way of saying to those people, “Yes, we’re aware that all these buttons are pushed for you, but you should really talk and think this through anyway, and ask, should the government really be making the decision to force you to have a child?”

[...]

I honestly think the issue has become more religious over time, because hiding behind religion is the only way that anti-choice arguments have any traction, now that mandating the patriarchy is off the table as the official reason to ban abortion. A fetus doesn’t have a functioning brain, but you can always say that it has a soul and get the troops whipped up. When people say the debate is over when “life” begins, they’re really talking about, for all intents and purposes, when a soul enters the body. “When life begins” is about wrapping theological questions into secular-sounding language to smuggle theocracy in, like the term “intelligent design”.

Keenan argued that pro-choicers should talk about moral complexity to get our foot in the door with the mushy middle, and then argue that because it’s complex, freedom of conscience and religion applies.

I've mangled the overall structure of her post, but hopefully anyone who's interested in her points can go read the link above. But what I love here is the way that Marcotte she sees abortion as a moral good (at least at some times for some people), and that in her mind, the "rights" of a clump of cells in no way infringe on the rights of a living, breathing person.

There's another bit here that she doesn't quite elucidate, but which I'd like to point out. It's easy for wishy-washy people in the "middle" on the abortion question to wish there was some sort of compromise, some sort of "middle ground" that could be reached on the question. But the truth is that in this country we are already at the point of "middle ground" -- a truly extreme position on abortion would take into account population growth questions, as well as the overall fitness of the mother and the financial circumstances the child would be born into, and essentially legislate away the rights of the mother to choose to have the kid. Automatic abortions to be performed on mothers clearly unable to care for the kid (i.e. drug-addicted, or indigent) is an extreme position, but it's a theoretically tenable one.

And yet this is considered monstrous, horrible to consider. It would take away the autonomy of the mother to make her own choice in the matter, and substitutes the state's force for the mother's rights. (And, just to be clear, I am in no way advocating for such a position myself!) So far as I am aware, there is no person, no government agency or private business, that has the ability to force the decision of abortion onto a person who doesn't want one. Choice is about choice, i.e. the right of the mother to make the best decision for herself and for the hypothetical child. In that sense, it is already a compromise position -- if you are a religious person who believes that the lump of cells inside you is a child, no one can make you get rid of it. In fact, if you are poor or have problems receiving medical care, the state will give you assistance in getting the care you need, and once the kid is born the collective "we" of government will give you at least some assistance getting the kid fed and clothed.

The world is a complex place. Every situation is slightly different, and the decision to end a pregnancy is rarely an easy one. No legislation can possibly capture the subtleties of these situations, and to me the only way of dealing with this is to allow the mother (who, after all, will have to carry the child) the freedom of choice in deciding what to do about it, in conjunction with her medical provider. And no amount of wishy-washy people feeling "icky" about medical procedures or religious conservatives using the words of nomads millennia ago should impact the essential rightness of individual choice one whit.

Wilkins on Information

John Wilkins has posted two posts regarding the use of information as a catch-all in biology. His thoughts on the usefulness of metaphors like a computer for DNA, or information processing in the making of proteins, is so similar to my own (and so much better informed) that I want to just stick a nice long excerpt here and be done with it.

Information talk privileges genes over other causal actors in biology (which is the point of the Griffiths and Gray "Parity thesis" counter-argument). But genes are only genes in the context of complex developmental systems - in a test tube, DNA sits there and slowly denatures. So by using information talk we allow causally significant parts of the system to fade into the background.

[...]

Information is not a physical cause of anything. Take my computer - it "reads" information from keystrokes, right? Well, only in an abstracted manner. What physically happens is that I complete a circuit when I hit a key, which causes electrons to be transported to processing circuitry, which converts that signal into a particular sequence of high and low voltages, which... and so on. The abstraction "information" does nothing here. The physical processes that we abstract out as information do.

...

in these days of particle and quantum physics, do we need the notion of form+substance any more? Certainly not for molecular biology, at any rate - let's leave those fundamental physics guys to do their thing for a century or so. Morphology no longer plays a causal role in biology except as the arrangement of particles and ensembles of particles. Want to explain why protein A cleaves to nucleotide X? Do so in terms of the shape if A and X, but do not stop there - form is the effect of the properties of the parts; the strong and weak bonds, the medium, the ambient energy level, and so on. We might be able to infer similar properties from similar forms, but the full explanation, in biology at any rate, has to include the makeup of the molecules and their degrees of freedom in folding and bonding properties.

So I think that if we are to take modern science seriously in our ontology of biology, we have to treat information as an abstraction made for our benefit, rather than as an inherent property of the objects themselves. This means of course, that my claim to treat as IPSs only those system that are isomorphic to a formal IPS resolves down to what we intend to take as satisfying those conditions. But as an instrumentalist, I am happy with that. Human brains process information. Genes don't. Somewhere in the middle is a border case in which I cannot say for sure, but my instrumentalist rule of thumb might be - can we use it as an IPS, even just theoretically? If so, it's an IPS.

This is a much more rigorous way of saying something that I feel somewhat intuitively about attempts to discuss biological processes as information processing -- that it's not so much wrong as it is not useful. Biological molecules do what they do in the way that they do it -- they work according to rigorous laws of physics and chemistry, and enough of them working in tangent can create some very non-obvious results. (Namely, us, and by us I mean life in general.)

To try to reduce this to some sort of general information-processing routine might make sense in a sort of metaphysical way, but getting away from the reality of the biology to a "higher" or "more abstract" level is also to get away from, well, the reality of the science. So everything is information? So what -- the whole universe is really just made up of solutions to Schrodinger's Equation, and in principle every problem of every discipline (up to and including sociology and economics) reduces to that simple fact. But just as it's useless to try to calculate waveforms in understanding budget deficits, it's nonsensical to try to use some computational analogy in trying to understand real biological phenomena.

The world is complex. Trying to understand hugely disparate phenomena based on narrow interpretations gleaned from pop-science books on computation (I'm looking at you, Stephen Wolfram!) is madness. If a computational approach to biology starts to produce real results, then I'll sit up and take notice, until then, stop using that silly "genes are like bits" notion that sets my teeth on edge.

Fundie Friday -- a view from I-65

I'm starting a new feature here at Endosymbiosis. Since I live here in the Heart of Dixie, Bible Country, whatever, and have a great deal of experience with certain forms of fundamentalist Christianity, every Friday I plan on posting a little something relating to that. It may be a review of a Christian movie or book, it may be some political commentary about the way the religious right votes, or even a bit of philosophy or theology that I find interesting.

Or, like today, it might just be a link to a silly picture.

I see this sign every time I go see my family in Millbrook. It's been there for at least a decade, and I have no idea who owns it or maintains it. Alabamians lacking any sense of perspective when it comes to religious faith, I'm pretty certain it's not meant ironically, but is it really meant to be taken entirely seriously? This bucolic, almost Edenic scene, which is then ruined with a placard referring people to church else this cartoony devil will eat your soul? It's astonishing, and it's just one more persnickety detail about living in a state of fundies.

Page-by-page of Left Behind

I just added Slacktivist to my list of political links. He's one of the best writers on American religion I've read in a long time, but the real reason I've added him is because of his series of posts in which he goes, a few pages at a time, through Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins' Left Behind. It's his Friday special, and he's spent three-and-a-half years going through just the first of these epic pieces of horrible literature (or, as Slacktivist calls them, The Worst Books in the World).

Besides being enlightening about the nature of modern American fundamentalism, the series is funnier than anything I've read in awhile, exposing the piss-poor characterization, insipid plotting, and just plain bad writing to a level of snark I've not seen since Scalzi's trip to the AIG creation museum. It's also a great primer on how (not) to write a novel, filled with the kinds of "teaching by bad example" that make me wonder if maybe more literature classes could be based on reading really bad works of fiction, instead of the Great Masterpieces of the Past (tm).

I know I'd love to take a class based on exposing the poor writing of The Da Vinci Code, anyway, and I'm so fucking tempted to subject John Ringo's There Will be Dragons to the treatment offered to Left Behind here. Just you wait....

Magic Fireball?

I'm just enough of a pyromaniac and a science geek to want to try this.



How To Make Fire Balls - video powered by Metacafe

It looks like the way it works is the cotton and thread soak up the lighter fluid but don't let it out -- the ball is wound tightly enough to not let oxygen in, and only allows the lighter fluid itself to burn. An excellent demonstration of combustion, and something I really want to try. (Outside, on a non-flammable surface at first, of course!

Best beer opener ever?

Found this on Geekologie's RSS feed this morning.




I can't tell what the bottle is, but that looks like a pretty nice Belgian beer. Maybe I can learn the technique and just use a chainsaw instead of a corkscrew from now on...

Thoughts on Ghostbusters.

This is going to be short, as I'm in Chattanooga on Shana's Apple Laptop, and this keyboard drives me crazy for longish typing. (How does anyone ever get used to a tiny little laptop keyboard? I guess it helps if you don't have big fingers like mine...)

Anyway, this isn't really a movielog entry, but last night Shana and I went to see Ghostbusters on the big screen at the Carmike Bijou here in Chattanooga. It was part of their classic film series (last week we saw The Neverending Story), and someone had actually dredged up an actual print from 1984, and for a piece of celluloid that's 23 years old, it was amazingly well-preserved, with only the occasional scratch.

So, thoughts on the movie? For a flick that's still the 30th highest grosser of all time adjusted for inflation, and one of the highest-grossing comedies of all time (second or third, depending on whether you count Shrek 2 in the "comedy" or "animated" category -- the other is Forrest Gump), it's amazingly quirky. It's one of the only movies I can think of that derives its humor not from stupidity but from intelligence -- even Ray's childlike glee at the pole in what becomes the Ghostbuster headquarters is rooted in the reality of this emotionally-stunted postdoc finding joy in simple pleasures.

Also, the flick is interesting structurally. Some scenes are drawn almost directly from early-eighties horror, like the sequence in which Gozer takes over Sigourney Weaver's apartment. Other scenes, which taking from a similar horror background, intersperse jokes major and minor to give the whole sequence a kind of slapsticky feel. Like, say, the sequence in which Rick Moranis is taken over by Gozer.

The writers (Dan Ackroyd and Harold Ramis) have an really wonderful way of dealing with the huge amounts of exposition required, in that one of the "geeky" ghostbusters will deliver some longwinded bit of technobabble, followed by Bill Murray either quipping in a way that makes it clear to the audience, or in some cases simply flat out demanding a simpler explanation. Interspersing the exposition with gags in this way isn't quite as direct as Bogie's old admonition for the director to put some camels fucking in the background to give the audience something to watch, but it keeps the jokes coming and allows the audience to follow without making the whole plot simplistic, or the explanations simply "dumb". For that matter, the whole character of Winston Zedamore (Ernie Hudson) seems to exist primarily to provide just this sort of structural function during sequences later in the movie in which Murray is off performing other plot actions.

And Murray. Holy fuck. I wasn't there during filming, but either he ad-libbed a huge proportion of his part (as with the original Meatballs) or he's simply such an amazing actor that he gives the feeling that the part was written expressly for him, or possibly he had an uncredited hand in the writing of the script. Either way, the man's a treasure in the film, the anchor for the multiple storylines, and ultimately the major reason in the movie's success.

Ultinately, Ghostbusters is an example of the magic of cinema, a time in which every department of the film was working in concert, and very nearly a perfect motion picture. The cast works seamlessly together, the writing is top-notch, and the audience swallows the preposterous premise and huge amounts of exposition without even realizing they're doing it. It's lightning in a bottle, a classic, great film, and possibly the greatest thing any person involved with the movie has ever done before or since. It remains just as fresh two decades and change later as it was upon original release, or when I first saw it on home video in the mid-eighties.

Booklog, Everything is Beautiful, Jonathan Safran Foer

Everything is Illuminated
Jonathan Safran Foer
276 pages (trade paperback)

This was a Christmas gift from Shana, as we each decided to get the other a copy of one of our favorite books. (I got her Slaughterhouse Five, in case anyone's keeping track at home.) I haven't seen the movie, and was only vaguely interested in the novel, but if Shana recommended it I intended to read it, if only to better understand her.

And to tell you the truth, at first it seemed like exactly the kind of overly-clever first novel that I was afraid it'd be. It's the story of Alex, a Ukrainian twentysomething obsessed with out-of-date American pop culture, and, well, a character named Jonathan Safran Foer -- together they go on a trip to find Foer's roots in a Russian Jewish village that was destroyed when the Nazis invaded in 1941. The sound you hear is me groaning at the premise, as the fictional character goes on a very similar journey to that which the actual author had taken.

In other words, this book seemed to be the very precious quote, unquote "fictional retelling" of something personally important to the author. Which, for a firsttime novelist not yet out of his early twenties, just seemed like a pretentious waste of time -- perhaps valuable in the writing, but insular and self-reflexive in a way that would make it too abstruse for anyone else to really care about. Or, at least, for me to care about.

Add in the fact that the book's prose varies between Alex's Borat-like diction (can't really blame Foer, because he wrote the book well before the Borat phenomenon, but it grated for me at first nonetheless), Foer-as-character's magical realism in telling the history of the village, and letters from Alex to Jonathan after the events of the book criticizing the way Jonathan has chosen to write it, and it seems, on the surface at least, to be exactly that kind of masturbatory writing exercise that sets my teeth on edge.

That said....

The book grew on me. After the first couple of dozen pages, the stilted dialect Alex uses for his sections become less grating, and the historical sections in which Jonathan (the character) writes his family's history start to reveal traces of what Jonathan (the writer) is trying to tell us about Jonathan (the character). There are moments of real human comedy between Alex, Jonathan, and Alex's grandfather (did I mention that he was along for the ride?) that left me laughing at times and smiling almost always.

While the concept may seem somewhat self-indulgent, Foer uses his alter ego as largely a caricature of the Rich American, more often the butt of the joke than the more-colorful Ukrainians. And, as the book progresses, the comedy begins to fade away and the darker undertones of the story begin to emerge. There is real tragedy in the distant past of Foer's family, and even worse than that among his more recent ancestors. And it is revealed that Alex's family has its own share of demons in the closet....

A measure by which we can measure the value of the kinds of literary techniques Foer uses here is to try to see if they add to, or detract from, the overall story being told. Does the prose get in the way of the narrative and the emotional arc, or does it reveal subtleties that would be lost without it? And in this case, Alex's pidgin English leads to a minor minimalist masterpiece in an old story that the Grandfather tells, so similar in many ways to horrible stories we have heard before, but utterly unique in the way Foer leads up to it, then executes it flawlessly.

What at first seems to be a self-indulgent lark slowly becomes a novel of surprising power, and what starts out as a slapstick comedy becomes engorged in the very heart of darkness. While less ambitious than Pynchon's magnum opus, the ending of the book even recalls in some ways the denoument of Gravity's Rainbow, in its collapsing narrative and central wartime metaphor of explosions and sex.

Foer has learned from the masters, and while I don't think Everything is Illuminated places itself on the first rank, it is against all odds an extremely competent work that I found incredibly moving and meaningful. It could even have that epitaph of Billy Pilgrim as its motto: "Everything was Beautiful, and Nothing Hurt."