Round Dice

Typepad, we need to talk...

God, I loathe Typepad. I loathe its sluggish website. I loathe its Typelists, Typeprofiles, Typewipes, Typejars and Typekeys. I loathe its chirpy uncool corporate cheer. I loathe its randomly-capitalized script language. I loathe the fact its menus only look like tabbed menus. I loathe its useless commenting system. I loathe its pathetic attempts to play catch-up with Facebook. I loathe that its spell-check has never heard of "Facebook". I loathe its half-assed blog export utility. I loathe that it doesn't have a body I can push down the stairs. And I'm glad I loathe it, because if I didn't, I'd use it more, and that'd really suck, coz I just loathe the mofu.

Reason & Religion: Odd Couple Redux

Just finished watching the debate between Sam Harris (The End of Faith) and Reza Aslan (No God But God) on C-SPAN. The topic:

"Does the Bible provide timeless prescriptions for our daily lives? Or does its inclusion of practices such as slavery preclude its ability to act as such a guide? Are Osama bin Laden's grievances with the United States purely theological, or also social and political? Reza Aslan, author of "No god but God," and Sam Harris, author of "Letter to a Christian Nation," take up these questions in this debate at the Los Angeles Public Library. The event also includes discussion on contemporary trends in Islam - including whether or not Muslims are unique in their religious fervor - and debate over the concept of the Koran as a perfect and immutable document."

Does that sound like a perfect evening or what! Jonathan Kirsch, a bearded, soft-spoken, bear-like dude with a no-nonsense legal letter-pad, kept the men from making any sudden Tysonesque moves. Kirsch's the author of A History Of The End Of The World. After a book like that, I guess he can handle anything.

The score? Well, Harris won. Reza circled round and round a profoundly oft-misunderstood point about profound transcendent experiences that had profoundly to do with context and interpertation sensitive to people's transcendent experiences that profoundly need no validation external to the fact of it being a profound transcendent experience.

OK. That's unfair. Reza's a smart guy. He's articulate to a fault. He was at his best when he dealt in facts. When Harris claimed that the Israel-Palestine conflict was a religious one, it didn't take Reza long to demonstrate Harris didn't know what he was talking about. But for the most part, Reza tried to explain away the irrationality of religion via rational arguments. It's the kind of contortion that'd get even B. K. S. Iyengar's knickers in a twist.

As I see it, Reza's main argument was that most rational questions about religion were misconstrued. He claimed that Religion wasn't about facts, the domain of science, but about "a sacred history." "Sacred history" is a lot like ordinary history except that true/false is replaced with significance/non-significance. For example, to ask whether Moses really parted the Red Sea or whether the god Ganpati really has an elephant's head is to miss the point. The correct question was to ask what these stories mean for their believers, why they matter. To keep harping on truth, evidence and logic was to be unsophisticated. Profoundly unsophisticated.

I was reminded of a joke in The Recruit. Al Pacino's explaining-- hoarse voice, bloodhound visage and all-- to his C.I.A. protege why he decided to betray another three letter agency, namely, the U.S.A:

"There's this parish priest, goes up to the pope, drops down on his knees, starts weeping, asking forgiveness. 'Holy Father, Holy Father, what am I to do? What am I to do? I do not believe in God anymore. What am I to do?' You know what the pope said? 'Fake it.' "

Perhaps Reza is in the position of that pope, asking the padre to defend something not because it was true but because it was important.

Review: 20 Cases Suggestive Of Reincarnation by Ian Stevenson

The homepage of the Univ. of Virginia's Division Of Perceptual Studies quotes Thomas Jefferson:

"I was bold in the pursuit of knowledge, never fearing to follow truth and reason to whatever results they led."

It is a fine quote, exactly the sort of postprandial statement one can imagine Jefferson making at Monticello, with a glass of Chateau d'Yquem in one hand and Sally in the other. They don't make presidents like him anymore.

But perhaps they do. That is, if Dr. Ian Stevenson is right.

Ian Stevenson's a medical doctor (internal medicine) trained at McGill University, the author of many peer-reviewed articles, and a former chaired professor at UVa. Dr. Stevenson's pursuit of the truth has led him into very odd territory. In the 60s through the 80s, he investigated cases in India, Ceylon, Brazil, Alaska, and Lebanon that were "suggestive of reincarnation."

There's a rough pattern to these reincarnation stories. A child -- usually between two and four years of age -- begins to claim that  he/she is actually so-and-so, now deceased. Parents resist said claims. Eventually, contact with so-and-so's family is made. Dénouement follows. At some point, ranging from 3 weeks to twenty years, Stevenson shows up with his tape recorder and interpreter. He interviews the families, cross-checks claims, classifies events into a typology, and then re-conducts the interviews with a second translator. The book describes twenty representative cases. His conclusion:

"In the cases of the present collection we have evidence of the occurrence of patterns which the present personality is not known to have inherited or acquired after birth in the present life. And in some instances these patterns match corresponding and specific features of an identified deceased personality. In such cases we have then in principle, I believe, some evidence for human survival of physical death. I say in principle, because I continue aware [sic] of particular weaknesses in the present cases."

I think he's mistaken. But whatever one may think of his extraordinary conclusion, the book will induce respect. His case reports are painfully detailed, monumentally tedious and reassuringly detached. It's shoe-leather research rather than arm-chair research. It's Masters and Johnson sans lubrication. The book is a lovely testament to what empiricism is all about.

Assuming the evidence is not manufactured out of whole cloth (in which case the book ranks with great literature), there's a neat little puzzle to be explained. Some of the cases are rather disquieting, especially the cases of Pramod and Swarnalata. Stevenson's methodology is not that of the doctor or the physicist but that of the detective. A detective more in the mould of P. D. James's Adam Dalgliesh than Conan Doyle's Holmes.

When Prayers Attack

Well, it's official. If you're scheduled for a coronary bypass, and the local Ned Flanders is busy organizing the congregation to pray for you, order the bastard to cease and desist immediately. Science has determined that intercessory prayer may significantly increase the risk of post-surgery complications for you.

This month's issue of the American Heart Journal has a paper by Benson et. al. on the effectiveness of intercessory prayer. They begin the paper by saying:

"Intercessory prayer is widely believed to influence recovery from illness, but claims of benefits are not supported by well-controlled clinical trials. Prior studies have not addressed whether prayer itself or knowledge/certainty that prayer is being provided may influence outcome. We evaluated whether (1) receiving intercessory prayer or (2) being certain of receiving intercessory prayer was associated with uncomplicated recovery after coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery."

And their conclusion?

"Intercessory prayer itself had no effect on complication-free recovery from CABG, but certainty of receiving intercessory prayer was associated with a higher incidence of complications."

In English: Prayer is ineffective at best, and knowing that you're being prayed for can be a risk factor as well.

The doctors are to be commended for three things: (1) for having the cojones to study the supernatural; (2) for giving "intercessory" a slightly sinister connotation; and (3) for making the Universe a slightly funnier place.

Deja Vu: The Strange Case Of Hussain Ali Qambar

In 1995, Hussain Ali Quambar, a forty-five year old Kuwaiti businessman and father of two -- Najiba, 6 and Taha, 3 -- converted to Christianity. He would probably have escaped public notice had he not got into a messy custody battle with his wife. Hussain Ali Quambar, now exposed for what he was -- Robert Hussain Ali -- found himself in deep ontological shit. At first, he was approached by reasonable men with a reasonable offer -- recant and reconvert -- but like all new converts, Robert Ali was quite inflexible. Besides, Kuwait is practically the Netherlands of the Middle East; what could possibly go wrong? 

Does God Have A Sense of Humor?

Well, we have the panda.

It's either the best proof ever of unintelligent design or God was cracking the genetic equivalent of "A monkey, a drunk and a priest walk into a bar..."

The Old Testament God is not known for His sense of humor. Oddly enough, when something is funny in the Bible, it usually has something to do with bellies (Abraham laughs when he hears God intends to fiddle with 90 year old Sarah's belly, Jonah in the whale's belly, the self-pitying belly-aching of the prophets, the damn fruit that began the whole mess, Mary's joke about, um, virginity...).

What about the other religions?

Ninda Stuti

    "Stuti", pronounced "Sthuthi", means "prayer/song". "Ninda" means "blame/complaint." A "ninda stuti" is essentially a prayer that is also a complaint.

    Prayers are supposed to be polite. If one is praying to an omnipotent entity, it is advisable to be as inoffensive as possible. God loves you, but you're His bitch, pal.

    The Hindus do things differently. They decided to break up the monopoly. Why not have a bunch of gods? Why not make them compete, like ravenous insurance agents, for your prayers? So the Hindus dreamt up 330 million gods. Impossible?

    Absolutely. It's way too small a number. Judging from CIA fact index, the number of gods is currently estimated to be about 6,446,131,400.  It's still an underestimate.

   The logic is quite straightforward. "Aham Brahmasmi." I am the Brahman. Not just me. Every living thing is a piece of the Brahman. Since we've not included aliens, bacter, Delhi's crows and opposums, the exact number of Gods is, like Rumsfeld said, an "unknown unknowable."

    But this is not about a holy census or an unholy consensus. It's about the consequences of having a market in Gods. One begins to take certain liberties. Such as getting a tad familiar with the Supernatural.