Globalisation: Tribalism v Liberalism

Melanie Phillips has posted "Liberalism v Islamism" in which she decries the apparent suicide of liberalism. She claims that by abandoning its principles for multiculturalism, liberalism is appeasing and succumbing to the Global Salafist Hirabah (aka the Jihad against the Jews and Crusaders - and if you are not an Islamist, then you're at least a Crusader). She also refers to London as "Londonistan," because of the increasing frequency of honor killings and other cultural baggage brought by immigrants from certain predominately Islamic countries.

She's a bit over the top, but well worth a read, nevertheless. We all need to recognize that the Hirabah is simply another facet of Globalization. Globalization was once thought to be a form of economic and cultural imperialism on the part of the West. Now we see that Globalization is a leveling of the world's playing field, so that not only money, but values - cultural values - can compete for territory, like players in a multi-way game of Go. In this case the counters on the board are not little round stones, but immigrants and less recent immigrants, or "natives."

Back in the old days, when it took months to travel from one country to another, new immigrants found themselves isolated in their new homelands. Messages to and from the old country took those same months to travel. It was almost impossible to keep reinforcing the values of the tribe you had left back home. (I use the word tribe, because the tribe is the fundamental unit of human societies, and has been so for as long as humans have lived on earth. If it seems less true in America, that is because everybody in America is from somewhere else, and has lost their tribal affiliation in the immigration process - except, of course, for the First Americans, who have had their tribal cultures overrun by the immigrants.)

Nowadays, you can migrate across the globe by stepping on an airplane. In a few hours, you are in your new country with your old affiliations and values. If you want to reinforce them, you need only pick up a telephone. Or tune into internet or satellite radio. Thus has Globalization made smooth the path for values from outside the prime Globalizers' (the "developed nations") core.

So, for those of you who want to be nice people, and who think it wrong to impose our Western Liberal values of limited government power, freedom of expression, freedom of religion, equality of women, etc., on other cultures, think again. If we do not live by, trumpet, and enforce those values in our homelands, and sell them abroad, then those other values that we think are "good enough for those people" will be lived by, trumpeted, and sold everywhere, even where you live.

No, pushing Western Liberal values isn't cultural imperialism anymore. In the Global Bazaar of ideas, it is just one voice among many, competing to be heard. Time to stand up and shout, before we are terrorized into silence.

Farewell to Jerry Falwell

The Rev. Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority has died of an apparent heart attack in his office at Liberty University, which he also founded. Guided by his Love for God and his concern for the well-being of his country, the United States of America, he gradually outgrew his early racism and anti-Semitism to focus on anti-feminism, anti-homosexuality, and anti-scientism. While some like Christopher Hitchens have impugned his sincerity, I have always assumed that he truly believed what he preached, even as it changed. That he did not preach violence to achieve his agenda, I find praiseworthy, given the world's recent struggles with clerics who do.

Perhaps one might wish that he had been guided by God's Love for him and for us all, and that he had outgrown his other anti- stances. Yes, he helped form the Christian Right into a more or less cohesive voting block. But the people who make up the Christian Right would still be with us even if he had not done so. Without him, they might have splintered into disenfranchised and bitter groups, some of which might have turned to violence in their increasing frustration. It's better to have them inside our polity than outside of it, and Jerry did his part.

So, thanks, Jerry. You did the best you knew how. I hope that you don't mind sharing Heaven with homosexuals, feminists, liberals and scientists, and I hope that at your eschatological banquet they don't serve you too much crow.

A Christian Kama Sutra

Stimulated by The Deadliest Things, one of our readers has contributed her own parody of a fictitious book to be released by a noted Christian publishing house.

Just click here and enjoy!

Oh. The image at left is from Les Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry, Folio 25v - The Garden of Eden in the Musée Condé, Chantilly. It appears here courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

The Deadliest Things

(Tune: My Favorite Things - from The Sound of Music, Rogers & Hammerstein)

Anthrax in orange juice and toxins in water
Chemical agents as means of mass slaughter
Plumes of chlorine wafting over DC
These are a few of the deadliest things.

Toxic nerve agents unleashed on civilians
Mutating strains of bird flu killing millions
Cattle with blisters transmit FMD*
This is what we have been analyzing

Suicide bombers blow buses to splinters
Slolen devices cause nuclear winter
Railcars torn open by an IED**
These effects we have been calculating

When the dog bites
When the bee stings
When I'm feeling sad
I simply remember what we're modeling
And then I don't feel so bad.

*Foot and Mouth Disease
**Improvised Explosive Device

Jim G-, my colleague who wrote this parody of sorts, wishes to remain anonymous. It's a bit hair-raising, but part of the tasking of our lab is to help the nation and its allies prepare to deal with the consequences of major natural or human-made disasters. We think them through, we model them with as much precision as we know how, and we report our results to our sponsors. We also work on attribution - figuring out where the stuff came from, and whodunit - so others of our sponsors can deal with the guilty parties and those who sponsored them. That's part of the Homeland Security side of the business, anyway.

It's scary stuff. It's only natural that it gives some folks in the government the willies, and induces them to occasional over-zealousness. To counter that, we also model which security measures make the greatest difference for the least amount of effort, money, and social change. The hard part about that is that politicians are used to doing what they want to do. They don't like rational calculation indicating priorities. The priorities are theirs for political posturing. A bunch of scientists trying to calculate priorities is received as stepping on their turf. And when it comes to turf, the politicians are the pros and the scientists are the amateurs. The pros always win. Our priorities are set by our politics, not by our systems analysis.

So we are still knee-jerking our way to greater homeland security, and the press tries to be "neutral," or as Mark Steyn puts in the Chicago Sun-Times:

According to genius New York Times headline writers, "Religion Guided Three Held In Fort Dix Plot." You don't say. Any religion in particular?

In other words, Homeland Security is only part of the solution to the present danger. Another part is making the bad guys feel insecure in their homelands. This is always problematic, and even more so when their homeland is our homeland. There is an essential tension between security and freedom, which can never be finally resolved. We must constantly strive for balance.

Yet another part of the solution is Religion itself. We must recognize that some of the greatest gifts God has planted in us - our capacities for Hope and Faith - can be perverted by the Evil One. As Pascal said, "Men never do evil so completely and so cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction." And Pascal himself was a devout Catholic.

Well. Got that off my desk. Happy Mother's Day everyone!

Forgiving Google

It's been more than a year since VCBC decided to boycott Google Ads for hypocritically stiffing the US Government hunting for internet child pornographers in order to give the false impression to Westerners that Google was a defender of human rights. At the same time, Google was knuckling under to the Chinese government by deleting all references that might help pro-democracy dissidents. Google could have done worse. Yahoo is being sued on behalf of Chinese citizens for providing information to the Chinese government that led to their illegal (under international law) imprisonment.

But you get the picture. Google's major competitors haven't distinguished themselves either. Instead of fulfilling Tom Friedman's prophecy that the internet would lead to greater freedom on earth, they are enabling it to be used as a tool of oppression as well.

So has our boycott been effective? Our search engine ratings, traffic, and revenues have declined. But the effect on Google has been absolutely nil. We made our point, and took our hit. Now we have decided to forgive Google, renew our advertising, and take our cut.

Our boycott was futile. On the other hand, the lawsuits over contributing to false imprisonment are probably not. They put the calculus of whether to cooperate with despots directly into the profit and loss columns. Web portals may still decide that it is more lucrative to cooperate with tyranny, but it will now cost them something to do it.

Dear Dr. Laura

by J. Kent Ashcraft

Dear Dr. Laura,

Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God's Law. I have learned a great deal from your show, and I try to share that knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind him that Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination. End of debate.

I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some of the specific laws and how to best follow them.

1. When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing odour for the Lord (Lev. 1:9). The problem is my neighbors. They claim the odour is not pleasing to them. Should I smite them?
2. I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?
3. I know that I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in her period of menstrual uncleanliness (Lev. 15:19-24). The problem is, how do I tell? I have tried asking, but most women take offense.
4. Lev. 25:44 states that I may indeed possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighboring nations. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can you clarify? Why can't I own Canadians?
5. I have a neighbor who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself?
6. A friend of mine feels that even though eating shellfish is an abomination (Lev. 11:10), it is a lesser abomination than homosexuality. I don't agree. Can you settle this?
7. Lev. 21:20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I have a defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear reading glasses. Does my vision have to be 20/20, or is there some wiggle room here?
8. Most of my male friends get their hair trimmed, including the hair around their temples, even though this is expressly forbidden by Lev.19:27. How should they die?
9. I know from Lev. 11:6-8 that touching the skin of a dead pig makes me unclean, but may I still play football if I wear gloves?
10. My uncle has a farm. He violates Lev. 19:19 by planting two different crops in the same field, as does his wife by wearing garments made of two different kinds of thread (cotton/polyester blend). He also tends to curse and blaspheme a lot. Is it really necessary that we go to all the trouble of getting the whole town together to stone them? (Lev.24:10-16) Couldn't we just burn them to death at a private family affair like we do with people who sleep with their in-laws? (Lev.20:14)

I know you have studied these things extensively, so I am confident you can help. Thank you again for reminding us that God's word is eternal and unchanging.

Your devoted disciple and adoring fan,

J. Kent Ashcraft

Editor's Note: This little gem has been circulating the net. It illustrates the absurdity of a selective and wooden literalism, even if it is not illustrative of Dr. Laura's thinking, other than her dogmatic stand against homosexuals. The copyright, if any, belongs to its author.

Retreat, Defeat, Cowardice and Treason

That's what friend Gator Bob (retired Navy) calls the US Democratic Party position on Iraq, as well as the not-so-well-named Global War on Terror (GWOT) in general. Perhaps he's being uncharitable. Perhaps not.

He points to the death rate among American soldiers and civilians in Iraq. Measured in deaths per hundred thousand, it is comparable to the murder rate in say, Washington, D.C. Perhaps the United States should pull out of Washington, he suggests.

But Right or Left, the emphasis on the death rate in Iraq is misplaced. Compared to previous wars (but not to previous occupations) it is low. What is high is the rate of serious and permanent injuries, the number of our young men and women coming home with pieces of their bodies or brains missing in action. But a national debate centered on that subject would be expensive. We might have to take care of them, so best not to mention them unless we can use them to sack a general.

The dead are already taken care of. They are comparatively cheap, like the talk on the Left and Right that obsesses about them, not for moral reasons, but for political ones. Unlike the wounded, the dead can be trusted not to contradict to whatever claims politicians and activists might make in their names.

Leaving the dead to their graves, and the wounded to their fates, let us move on to the future. Both the Left and the Right seem to be staring at their toes, and thinking that whatever way their toes are pointing is forward. The Right says "Stay the Course," without articulating what that course is and where it will lead. The Left says, "We aren't getting anywhere, so let's get out fast," without hazarding a guess as to what will happen next, either to the Iraqis, the Middle East, Islam, or even us.

That is to say, there is no strategic thinking in evidence from either side. I'm not asking for much, here. I'm thinking of a game of pool, in which a player who's any good tries to hit the cue ball not just to knock another ball into a pocket, but to then position the cue ball so as to be able to make the next shot. What I want to know from both the Democrats and the Republicans is: (1) What position will we (all of us, the entire world) be in if we take your shot, (2) what is your next shot, and (3) how will your first shot line us up to make the next one?

So far, all I've seen and heard is spokespersons for either side looking at their toes and whining. I used to do that, too, when I was three years old.

The House of Misrepresentatives

American politics has become ridiculously polarized, to the point where the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, is willing to travel to Syria in order to make her own foreign policy, but not to walk across the aisle of the House floor to talk with the Republicans. Our politics are so polarized that Democrats and Republicans fear and distrust each other more than they do, say al-Qaeda. (Because al-Qaeda may kill a few of them, but it can't really threaten their hold on domestic power.)

So how did this idiotic state of affairs come to be? I give you one word for it: Gerrymandering. Our state legislatures have drawn and re-drawn Congressional voting districts to advantage incumbents to the point that in any given year only a handful of Congressional elections are competitive.

The effect of this is that in order to win, you can't compromise. The voters in your district are dominated either by hard-over Moonbats (left) or Wingnuts (right). By showing any willingness to entertain the ideas of the other party, you merely show weakness to your own voting constituents. And then you lose. Compound this with a media that panders to the public's love of a good political fight, and you get politics that is progressively polarizing itself for no better reason that a positive feedback loop in the re-districting process.

What we need is for each state to have its districts re-drawn by a non-partisan committee of geographers, demographers, mathematicians, and a retired judge or two. People with a sense of justice and fair play with no major stake in the outcome. People who understand population distributions, and convex sets.

That way we could get Congresspersons who would have to demonstrate their willingness and ability to bargain and compromise. That way we could get a government that actually represented the Will of the People, rather than our current tragicomical lurching from left to right and back again. And maybe we could even get a more consistent and thoughtful foreign policy, that might do some good in the world rather than just kicking it one way or the other every four to eight years.

So Americans, unless you are a Moonbat or a Wingnut, your Congressperson does not represent you. Your voice has been Gerrymandered into silence. You don't count. And you won't count unless and until you get an anti-Gerrymandering measure on your state ballot, and vote for it.

How Free is the USA?

The latest "big thing" is how President George W. Bush has sacked some US Attorneys. Maybe he sacked them in order to let the others know that they had better be zealous in investigating and prosecuting possible malfeasance on the part of Democrats. That kind of exercise of arbitrary power makes me suspicious. It reminds me of the time President Bill Clinton sacked all the US Attorneys and replaced them with his own people. Maybe he did it to insure that certain details about that Whitewater thing would never come out.

Both men could exercise arbitrary power within certain bounds. And if they did not exercise it, then they would lose power, because their opponents would chisel away at their power in other areas. In other words, they did what they could because they had to. It's the way our system works.

They were trying to protect themselves from accusations. Had they actually broken any laws, which would validate the claims of those who sought to accuse them? Of course. So have you, if you're an American. We have so many laws, which are so complicated, that you can't know them all. Chances are, you've fallen afoul of one or more of them somehow, somewhere in your life. All it takes for you to find out is to enrage someone who has the resources and desire to have you investigated. We have so many laws that we are no longer a nation of laws, but of people. The only reason you have freedom of speech or action or property rights is that nobody is currently willing to make the effort to take them away from you.

It's the kind of tyranny that creeps over all democracies, one well-intentioned law, regulation, rule, or judicial opinion at a time:

It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd. — Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Volume II, Chapter 4, Section 6, "What Sort of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear"

The counter-argument is that as our society gets more complex, we need more complicated rules to govern it. On the other hand, it is a well-known result from the science of complex systems that "Simple rules lead to complex behavior - complex rules lead to simple behavior." Too many complex rules freeze the system up. None of its parts can do much of anything.

What to do? When a computer code gets too long and unreadable, the computer scientists "re-factor" it. They look at how it is supposed to work, and, having learned from their past mistakes and new developments, re-design it and re-code it from the ground up.

We need our Congress and our regulatory agencies to re-factor government. Not just to keep making up new stuff to pile on top of the old because nobody remembers what it does anymore. And not to re-factor with laws and regulations that are even more complicated than the originals because they are written by unelected staffers who promote for their own agendas without ever coordinating with each other or even - gasp - reading each other's sections of the documents they produce.

But until that happens (and Hell freezes over, I suppose) I have a word of advice. Once anyone gets elected or appointed to any office of public power, that person must be suspect. It is in the nature of power itself in a society governed by too many small complicated rules. One in power must abuse the system to protect herself or himself from those who are abusing the system to get at them. As the old saying goes, "Politicians are like diapers. They both should be changed frequently, and for the same reason."

Teach the Boobs Economics

Now the poor in Mexico are facing hunger because the price of corn is rising on speculation, because the US is planning to up the percentage of ethanol (made from corn) in auto fuel. But that would require re-directing a substantial fraction of US corn production from food and animal feed to fuel. This in turn would raise corn prices. Moreover the demand for more corn acreage would displace other grains, like rice, and drive up the price of rice as well. And the poor of Mexico can't switch to wheat flour because they need the nutrients in corn flour to complement the rest of their diet. So, we are driving up the price of corn and rice worldwide, and pushing more poor people into malnutrition. Why?

The idea was to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels. But (duh!) to make ethanol you have to heat the corn mash using - you guessed it - fossil fuels. The net result is that the ethanol will have a bigger "carbon footprint" in the atmosphere than the gasoline it is supposed to replace.

In other words, we are starving people and polluting the air so that our legislators and regulators can make a show of caring for our environment. I'm tired of people who know nothing but politics trying to run our world when they don't understand how it works.

So here's a resolution for you: Let's require all newly elected federal and state officials to take a three week crash course in Economics and Energy before they assume office. Heck, let's make them retake the course every time they are re-elected.

The effort on their part to learn the course material would be an act of loving their neighbors, namely us - the people they presume to govern.

Flying Low

Speaking of technology, have a look at this video of low flying jets.



If you can't see anything, click Flying under the radar.

Name Your Fear

Since the previous post mentioned fear, here is a post from my MySpace page.

The other evening, we got together with friends for a "Bring Your Own Barbecue." We talked about law school, career changes, psychotherapy, religion... And then we talked about the future. We must be in a time of great transition, because the dominant mood was not hope. It was fear.

I talked about how genetic engineering, implants, and other high tech "enhancements" could make the people of the future so different from us that they might not consider "non-enhanced" or "natural" people like us to be fully human. And how, by tinkering with human nature itself, we would undermine the basis of Natural Law.

Our host spoke of Global Warming, and how climate change could wipe out agriculture in some parts of the world, and sink coastal cities.

My wife talked about how the melting of the North Polar Icecap could decrease the salinity gradient in the North Atlantic that drives the Gulf Stream. If the Gulf Stream were to stop, that would almost shut down the transfer of heat from the equatorial to the polar regions. The result could be a rapid re-freezing of the northern latitudes resulting in a new Ice Age. In other words, our climate is metastable, with tipping points beyond which large and sudden changes may occur.

I suppose we could have mentioned asteroid impacts, and global thermonuclear war while we are at it. Or maybe the day some terrorist organization gets hold of a nuclear weapon and detonates where you would least like it.

So I'm just curious. Was it just us, or are other people having anxious thoughts about the future. What sort of thoughts?

God's Balls

The other day LutheranChick wondered why there is so much resistance to inclusive language references to God in the Church. "Inclusive language" means either avoiding the masculine pronoun or using both masculine and femine pronouns for God. She offered her hypothesis that the resistance is grounded in fear, specifically the anxiety that God is out to get us if we don't act the way God wants.

That may indeed be the case for many. For me, it's different. I'm comfortable with someone beginning The Lord's Prayer with, "Father-Mother God," instead of "Our Father." I might even do it myself, if I were praying with people the majority of whom would find the traditional reference off-putting. But generally, I stick with "Our Father." I do it out of respect for those who have gone before me, who made extraordinary sacrifices that Christianity might be a living faith to my generation, who learned to say it that way. I do it out of respect, even awe, for the tradition goes all the way back to a wandering Jewish woodworker, healer, and lay preacher named Yesu (Jesus) who called God, "Abba," which is Aramaic for something like, "Daddy."

Now we could use the original Aramaic and say "Abba," instead of "Our Father." "Abba" doesn't mean anything in English, and therefore is not automatically associated with gender by English speakers. But for English speakers that would come at the cost of losing the emotional and spiritual impact of addressing God in terms of an intimate parental relationship. In the same vein, we could start the Lord's Prayer with the word, "God," but again we would miss the impact of what something like "Our Father," says about God.

I'm not afraid, just respectful. I can let the tradition bend. And yet, I get my back up when someone insists that I must use inclusive language. I know that the idea of God being masculine is God's sop to the patriarchal tribal society of Hebrews in which God first planted ethical monotheism. And I know that many of us no longer need that sop. But must we wrench things the other way, cutting off God's balls, as it were, in order to make God into an icon of gender-equality? Must God be treated like some kind of intellectual property, to be stretched in a tug-of-war between Fundamentalists and Feminists?

Yes, I know. God transcends gender. Balls are not God's problem. But the historical Jesus, recognized by his followers after his glorious Resurrection as the unique Incarnation of God, had them. Let's be honest about that while we are working to include each other, however we are gendered (male, female, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered only begin to describe the possibilities).

Finally, our concern over inclusive language must seem extremely parochial to non-English speakers. What about speakers of German, French, and Italian whose nouns have gender and for whom the word "God" itself is masculine? I think we have it relatively easy.

None so Blind as Richard Dawkins

While driving this weekend, I tuned into NPR and caught a bit of a program about science and religion. It was biologist Richard Dawkins declaring that the question, "What is the meaning of life?" is no more worthy of an answer than, "Why are unicorns orange?"

I was struck by the realization that debating Richard Dawkins on religion would be like debating a congenitally blind skeptic on the reality of color. Dawkins appears unable to have anything resembling a religious experience, and therefore to doubt that anyone else does. Further, he seems to believe that there is in principle a completely naturalistic (or materialistic) explanation of any such experience.

Well, let's get really scientific about it. As a physicist, I can tell you that there is no such thing as color. There are different wavelengths of light, and specific retinal and neural responses to them. But the experience of color is entirely subjective. It's all in your mind.

Dawkins might object to my analogy because there is a neurophysiological explanation for color perception (but not, I hasten to add for its subjective experience). Yet there are also neurophysiological correlates of religious experience - specifically of Western-style experience of mystical union with God, and of Eastern-style experience of oneness with Everything, as documented in Why God Won't Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief. The authors take pains to explain that all experience is "all in your mind," and that the absence of an identified sensory organ does not make that experience any less real. Perhaps the brain itself is the sensory organ of religious experience.

Now Dawkins would argue that if there are neurophysiological correlates of religious experience, then religious experience is entirely neurophysiological - no supernatural ingredients required. But just as I cannot prove that there is a supernatural ingredient, neither can he prove that there is not. The only scientifically tenable position is agnosticism - because if your are an agnostic then you can prove that you do not know whether God exists by the methods of unaided reason.

Dawkins' argument that the supernatural cannot exist is equivalent to the argument that everything that exists can be apprehended by the methods of science. But that is something which science itself has known to be false ever since Goedel's Theorem of 1925, in which Goedel proved that within the confines of any finite, non-trivial, non-contradictory set of axioms, it is possible to construct a statement whose validity can be neither proven nor disproven. Therefore, Dawkins' insistence that any question which cannot be answered by science be declared inadmissible is his attempt to turn his erroneous assumption about the universality of science into a kind of Orwellian NewSpeak in order to make all sensibilities become as stunted as his own.

But I have to admire the Religious conviction with which he pursues his mission to make all nations disciples of his atheism.

What is Church, anyway?

I feel moved to say a few words about bricks-and-mortar churches vs cyberchurches. But first, a few words from our Sponsor:

And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. - Matt 16:18 KJV

For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body.

For no one ever hates his own body, but he nourishes and tenderly cares for it, just as Christ does for the church, For no man ever yet hated his own flesh; but nourisheth and cherisheth it, even as the Lord the church:- Eph 5:23,29 KJV

When I was a child, I thought church was a place you went on Sunday, because that's where people were supposed to go. It was the right thing to do, part of the proper way to be a person. I was shocked out of this way of thinking by my church's deafening silence after my father died. But its residue led me after 20 years to join another church, until a conflict among its members drew me in. After it was over, I became a wanderer, visiting many churches, joining none, and not going every Sunday. While I was still a regular churchgoer ("churched," they call it) I became a Stephen Minister. As an extension of my ministry I even started a cyberchurch, the Virtual Church of the Blind Chihuahua, of which this blog is a part. So again, what is Church? Am I still a part of it, and is cyberchurch really church?

Objectively, Church is the social network of all the believers, the clergy, and God (who, according to Church doctrine makes Himself available to the Church as a person - any and all of three persons to be exact). In the medieval Catholic way of thinking, the Church as social network formed an acyclic graph. Each person is represented as a node (like a Tinker Toy connector for you old folks), and each link represents an association or connection from one person to another (like a Tinker Toy stick). The graph starts with God, with links going from God to the Pope, from the Pope to the Cardinals, from the Cardinals to their Bishops, from the Bishops to their Priests, and finally from the Priests to the congregations of their People. The Protestant innovation was to make the network cyclic by positing a direct connection between every node (person) and the network hub (God). From a Social Network/Graph Theoretic perspective, the old Wars of Religion between Catholics and Protestants in Europe were over a change in topology.

Being a Protestant, I believe not so much that I keep up my connection to God through prayer, but that God keeps up God's connection to me, without my deserving the favor. This implies that I am still connected to the Church social network through its hub, through God. But there is more to Church than that.

Church has always meant communal worship. Not online, not in front of your TV, but in the physical presence of one another, the entire community of the faithful gathered together. A huge part of the love that Jesus commanded us to have for one another is attachment, a term which refers to the way mammals in close proximity influence each others' metabolic and neural (especially limbic system) rhythms. This occurs through postural cues (body language), gesture (including touch), and lots of other ways, including even the sound of each other breathing. This communal limbic resonance and limbic regulation is probably responsible for the statistic that regular churchgoers are healthier and live longer than the unchurched.

Perhaps the staid nature of worship in the mainline liberal Protestant denominations explains their decline in membership. We mammals crave limbic togetherness, which is mediated by our rhythms. Would it really diminish our neocortical liberalism if we had a little shoutin' and foot stompin' in the pews? But how much more would it revive the church if we took on the task of actually caring for one another?

Church is not only in your rational neocortex, but also in your emotional, soulful limbic body-mind - not only in your head, but in your heart. Cyberchurch cannot replace physical congregation. The Virtual Church of the Blind Chihuahua is merely an add-on, a sop to those of us who live too much in our heads, and a source of provocative ideas for those of us who don't.

Of course, there is infinitely more to Church than I have mentioned here. I have not even touched on the spiritual dimension, what it means to be a servant of God in community with other servants, the vulnerability of Church to the shadow-side of human organizations, etc. I've written about some of that elsewhere. For the rest, you might try asking your pastor.


References:
[1] For more on social networks see Albert-Laslo Barabasi, Linked.
[2] For more on attachment, limbic resonance, and limbic regulation see Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini and Richard Lannon, A General Theory of Love.

Search Sucks, Too

While we're at it, search sucks, too. Sure, once you've got the hang of using a computer, it's easy to type search terms into, say, Google. But finding what you're really looking for? That's hit and miss. Partly it's because there is no agreement on standards for making content findable.

But a huge part of it is because search engines don't really understand the language of the documents they are searching. This is about to change. Cognition Technologies has designed and built a search architecture that actually understands language, and that has been initialized for several subject areas in English. Stubs exist to initialize it for a wide variety of languages and subject areas.

But if someday we could put all the pieces together - standards for findability, natural language query and understanding, and learning the intention of the searcher (the shared computer-user state space of yesterday's article) we might actually have a search capability that finds what we're looking for.

Of course, that may doom VCBC. Most people find us by accident. In other words, we have a growing audience because search engines turn up unintended stuff. Oh, well. Nothing we do lasts forever.

Why Personal Computers Still Suck

We have had personal computers for over a quarter century, and they still suck. Yeah, I know, they can play music and video now, and that's cool, but think about all the little steps you have to go through to get a computer to do what you want. Point here, click once there, double click that, drag down this menu which, by the way, is completely different from what it was before you did that other click...

What you are doing is navigating the large, but finite internal space of states that the computer can be in so that you can finally get to that last command that triggers the desired response. You do it using that part of your brain that lets you navigate through familiar and unfamiliar real spaces, like shopping malls, and lets you find your car in the parking lot when you're done shopping. If you have a stroke in your right vertebral artery, which keeps this region alive, you may be able to walk and talk, but you won't be able to use your computer. At least not until after a long period of retraining.

Which makes me wonder: why after all these years are we still navigating the computer's state space? Don't computers now have the processing power to start navigating our state space? After all, there are only a finite number of commands you can give a computer. Therefore, there are only a finite number of commands you can want to give a computer - at least from the computer programmer's point of view.

Why do we have to remember where to find the obscure command that formats the margins the way we what, or go through three click-and-drags to get a Greek letter? Computers now have keyboards, mice, microphones, and cameras. It's time for operating systems programmers to make computers that understand typing, points, clicks, scrolls, and some words and gestures - and that use those inputs to figure out what we want them to do.

It's time for the computational burden of learning and remembering the shared computer-user state space to shift from the user to the computer.

It ain't necessarily jihad!

What is being passed off today as jihad is not jihad. Let me tell you something about jihad.

In about A.D. 627 the first Muslim community al-Madinah faced destruction in what has come to be known as the Battle of the Trench. A champion of the pagan forces trying to wipe out Islam had managed to cross the trench and challenged the Muslims to send their bravest warrior to duel with him. The Prophet's son-in-law Ali took up the challenge, and bested his opponent. Just as Ali was about to strike the final blow, his opponent spat in his face. Ali sheathed his sword and walked away. Only when the man came at him again did Ali finally kill him. When he was asked why he had not finished his opponent at his first opportunity, Ali answered that when the man spat on him, he became angry. Ali did not want to kill the man because of his anger — that would have been contrary to God's will regarding jihad. He was willing to kill only to defend Islam and Muslims. He had recovered his purity of purpose when the man attacked him the second time.

What a contrast to the venom spewed out by the Global Fundamentalist Hirabah! They so deny the anger and hatred in their souls, and so conflate it with God's Will, that they twist centuries of Islamic tradition regarding jihad into justifying hirabah - the killing of innocents and non-combatants to achieve their own satisfaction.

And they do this as a way of achieving salifiyyah, a return to the ways of the Prophet and the Rightly Guided Ones. But what they pass off as salifiyyah is not salifiyyah. They want to yank the world back to the 6th century. But they forget that the Prophet and his Companions did not want to move the world backwards. They wanted to move it forwards. They were not conservatives - they were innovators, who respected certain traditions, but who made all things new. A true salifiyyah does not seek to run time backward, but to move it forward constructively. It asks not how to make the world like the world of the Prophet's time, but what the Prophet and his Companions would do if they were transplanted to our own time. How would they adapt? How would they innovate? What traditions would they let go and what traditions would they re-invigorate in order to make the world new again?

Again, what a contrast to the salifiyyah of the Global Fundamentalist Hirabah! They deny that Right Guidance act through a whole people in the form of Representative Democracy. To them Right Guidance is still the intellectual property of a few (themselves, of course) despite the historical fact that the few have guided Islam away from its position of world prominence since the early fifteenth century.

At least, that's how it looks to this Judeo-Christian outsider. Comments, anyone?

Walking away from North Korea

China seems to delight in letting North Korea make trouble for the US. I have news for China. Your lenience toward North Korea will have consequences that the US cannot prevent and that you will not like.

Consider that Japan is watching the US. She is judging the steadfastness of the US posture in Afghanistan and Iraq. She remembers the way the US ran from Vietnam. She believes that even Israel does not trust the US nuclear umbrella for protection. If Japan sees that she must live with North Korean nuclear-tipped missiles, she will almost certainly decide that the prudent thing would be to have some of her own.

And so, I think that the US should begin walking away from North (and South) Korea. Either China will step up to the plate and bring this bit of proliferation madness to an end, or China will have to live with a nuclear armed Japan. And possibly (in time) even a nuclear armed South Korea.

Let's see. Nuclear India. Nuclear Pakistan. Nuclear North Korea. Nuclear Japan. That will be quite a nuclear neighborhood for nuclear China to handle. We should wish them luck.

Homecoming

She has a perceptual deficit, a hole in her world from an old stroke. She ignores anything lower than her mid-thighs. She has vertigo whenever she gets up from lying down. Her standing and walking balance and coordination are less than ideal. She has osteoporosis. But the staff at the skilled nursing home where she was doing rehab for her hip fracture couldn't assemble these pieces into a coherent picture any more than she could. They told her she could go home, and so that is where I took her, back all those 3000 miles. Once they told her she could go, there was no persuading her to do anything else. She fell again within days, but didn't break any bones this time. I stayed with her there for a week, all I felt I could spare. I arranged for what in-home care I could. And now I've returned to my own home where I wait on pins and needles for her new medical alarm system to inform me of the next fracture.

Watching her decline, it seems to me that getting older means that whatever you do every day becomes the most you can possibly do any day. Which means that if you're middle aged, you are setting your limits right now. If you usually don't walk more than a block each day, then old age will mean that you can't walk more than a block in a day.

So, I exercise. To give myself breaks while I was staying with her, I walked an hour each day that I could. I walked on streets that are cuts in an otherwise uninterrupted forest. When I was young, I could hear my own footsteps on those streets, mingled with the songs of the forest inhabitants: birds, insects, frogs.

I can still hear my footsteps there, but mingled with new sounds. The whoosh and thrum of the new interstate highway that now links her little town so conveniently with the outside world. It sounds like the sighs and groans of a people in a constant and terrible hurry.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep
But they have promises to keep
And miles to drive before they sleep.

Time itself seems in a terrible hurry when I watch her slow struggle with a bottle of medicine, a pair of shoelaces, or a simple meal heated in a microwave oven. Time is going faster than she can keep up. She is falling behind. Soon, too soon, fracture or no fracture, it will race on without her, and the rest of us with it.