I dare any of you to try to complete just one of the ten back and forth entries betweeen Lord Saletan and Douthat on faith in American society.
If you don’t want to kill yourself by the end of the first paragraph there is something very, very wrong with you.
schrodinger's cat
Please summarize, I thought you read them so that we don’t have to. Or you can always put up some action shots of Tunch.
gogol's wife
Okay, I’m a believing Christian, but I couldn’t get past this:
“But you’re defending the whole ball of wax: the chosen people, the virgin birth, the Catholic hierarchy, and all that stuff from Jesus and Leviticus about fornication. You’ve gone after every indulgence of modern life: gourmet food, financial speculation, non-procreative sex—even yoga. The cynic in me is tempted to boil down the message to a tweet: If it feels good, don’t do it.”
Morat20
I read the last two:
Shorter Will: Dude, it’s got to suck your religion makes you hate gay people. You totally realize your religion is going to 180 on this and leave you looking foolish? I kinda feel sorry for you.
Shorter Ross: Screw you. Also, you hate religion and don’t understand it or you’d hate gays too. Don’t pity me.
gogol's wife
These guys wouldn’t know faith if it came up and bit them.
Karmakin
Yup. Couldn’t get past the first paragraph. “Dear Ross”. Ugh.
schrodinger's cat
I think I like Douthat the least on the NYT op-ed page. At least you can point and laugh at MoU and Bobo. Douthat is nothing but a moral scold. I wonder if he would be so moralistic if he had either good looks or charm. Since he has no redeeming qualities, he preaches. He writing is bland, I have to wonder how he got the Times gig. There are so many better writers out there.
Bruce S
“If you don’t want to kill yourself by the end of the first paragraph there is something very, very wrong with you.”
Of course this is hyperbolic, but “kill yourself?” WTF? How about just laughing by the end of that bizarre first paragraph?
dp
Not no, but hell no.
gaz
@schrodinger’s cat:
This is clearly a thinly veiled pledge drive. =)
gaz
@JC: Wake me when Sadly, No! gets around to it =) should I just link to them in advance?
cathyx
But that means I will have to read the bible first. I think not.
geg6
No fucking way, Cole. I want to kill myself just at the thought of reading that drivel. Fer fuck’s sake, don’t you have better things to do on a Sunday afternoon than troll your own blog, man?
Shit. Lord Saletan and Chunky Reese Witherspoon? Shit.
superfly
It’s a shame that mental masturbation is not a sin.
Juju
Sorry, my Sunday afternoon is way to precious to waste my time on that drek, especially after the first paragraph preview. Yick.
Suffern ACE
The smug debating the smug. There just isn’t enough to differentiate. It’s like a wrestling championship between two heels or two faces.
Miki
I can’t be the only one who sees “Douthat” and thinks “DoucheHat.” Every. Fucking. Time.
And that means that, no matter what, I can’t read the guy without seeing my lovely pink (1980s) douche-bag on top of his head. Maybe even stretched over his head like a condom at Dick’s Last Resort in Chi-Town. Except that was funny – once. Right after my second divorce. I mean Dick’s was funny, not my douche bag.
IAE, it saves me from reading anything written by a fuckingdouchehat.
Jesus. Fucking. Christ.
p.a.
wow. Just wow. Will Douthat go to hell based on Saletan’s opening being a nice wet rim job?
Schlemizel
In an earlier thread today some said “why would anyone read Slate, Atlantic or (sorry I forget the third)” and I thought that was a bit over the top. But then I see shit like this & think maybe they just go to where all thinking people will be eventually
Jennifer
As I’ve noted elsewhere – I’ll summarize it for you:
Essentially what you have here are two guys arguing over who’s got the most angels dancing on his pinhead.
Matoko Borgia-Steeler
You could have warned us that there was a particularly repellent picture of Douthat’s leering werewolf visage next to the first paragraph. Frankly, that was more than enough to induce nausea.
General Stuck
Yoga? My gawd. That boy needs a good long dunking in the river of righteousness.
bemused
I skimmed it. Dear Prudence is more interesting.
BGinCHI
Those two need to get a room.
Suggestion: the 7th circle of hell is nice this time of year. Try the pool and the fish tacos.
Brian S
@Schlemizel: There are decent individual writers of both those sites–you just have to seek them out specifically and avoid the rest of the dreck.
Roger Moore
@cathyx:
You should try it. You don’t have to torture yourself by reading the KJV, and you sure as hell don’t have to believe it, but I think it’s worth it to read the Bible just so you know where the believers are coming from.
Matoko Borgia-Steeler
@bemused:
I swear she steals old letters to the editor of Playboy or Southern Inc.est Fantasies. Or even unleashes her extremely frustrated inner sex-beast. I simply can’t believe that those letters she receives are for real.
Amir Khalid
@schrodinger’s cat:
The blandness of Chunky Bobo’s writing might well have been the selling point for the NYT. That and his right-of-center opinions, since they hired him to fill Bill Kristol’s right-of-center columnist spot. (Kristol was hired on a year’s probation. His columns were so full of glaring factual errors that Kristol, himself a magazine editor, didn’t pass this probation period.)
I mean, just imagine a Matt Taibbi or Charles Pierce of the right writing a column there. I’d pity the poor copy editor who had to tone the vituperation down, twice a week, to something that wouldn’t give the typical NYT reader a bad case of heartburn.
RSA
I only got to Entry 4, where Douthat says,
This combination of cluelessness and dishonesty wore me down enough to stop there.
White Trash Liberal
I got through two. Omfg what a pair of colossal asshats.
The whole reason Chunk’s precious orthodoxy has broken upon the rocks is because of capitalism. Orthodox and Reform Capitalism. Deep down, Chunk knows this, and furthermore I know he’s an ordained Capitalist minister, otherwise he wouldn’t be able to publish his execrable dreck.
gaz
@RSA:
Wait what? Did Douthat just blame liberals for pedophile priests?
PeakVT
Can’t you challenge us to something more fun, like an arugula-eating contest?
ETA: I didn’t make it past the pic.
Matoko Borgia-Steeler
Lord Saletan seems to be carrying around quite a few imaginary friends of his own.
Heliopause
Why do a book review in the form of an exchange of love letters between two individuals? Bit of an annoying format, quite aside from the content.
AdamK
Could not stand to read more than a few flatterations from Saletan before I was ready to hurl. Cole wins.
beltane
@gaz: While I’m sure Douthat does blame liberals for pedophile priests, I think in this case he’s blaming liberals for making it illegal to discriminate based on sexual orientation. Since the RC Church has made it abundantly clear that they value the ability to discriminate against gay people more than they value their charitable activities, the liberals are obviously to blame. Liberals are such meanies after all.
gaz
@beltane: I was considering adding a /snark indicator to my initial comment, but I’m glad I left it out. You make an interesting point.
beltane
@Heliopause: This is an epistolatory book review, written in the style of Samuel Richardson’s 18th century novel Clarissa. Come to think of it, both Douthat and Saletan belong in an 18th century novel, every single one of which seems to feature a priggish pastor.
Schad
The worst part is that Saletan, for once in his godforsaken life, makes a salient point in the ninth part of the exchange, about gay marriage (namely, that the Catholic church has a long and storied history of declaring certain behaviours as moral boundaries that simply cannot be crossed, only to cross them 50-100 years after the rest of the world), and Douthat ignores it entirely to go on an incoherent ramble about Christian heresy.
Subtract the parts where they talk by each other, and there’s nothing left but the two of them fluffing their opposite number with paeans to their own open-mindedness. What a mess.
Judas Escargot, Your Postmodern Neighbor
I ran into this tidbit from Douthat a couple days ago:
This is straight out of Strauss, who in turn copped it from Nietzsche. Nietzsche used the term “diluted Christianity” to describe both the modern liberal welfare state (then in its infancy under Bismarck) as well as Marxism, and loved warning the lefties that once you get rid of God, you get rid of the absolute moral foundation of the liberal value system.
I wouldn’t even say that Nietzsche was strictly wrong on this point… but only because there is no such thing as an “absolute moral foundation” at all, at least not in the sense that a religionist like Douchehat wants to have.
But I just don’t see how pointing out that secular/liberal values certainly did evolve out of the older Christian framework necessarily invalidates secularism. Secularists liked at least some of the Christian values, but no longer believed in the Christian God (or at least no longer wished to use that concept as the keystone of their moral systems). So they had to move on to other intellectual frameworks to support those values.
If anything, the Secular have the tactical/rhetorical advantage, because they don’t have to ultimately reduce every moral argument to “because Sky-Daddy said so”. But good luck getting someone like him to admit this.
Of course, no one respectable reads Strauss or Nietzsche anymore. So we can go on having the same conversations we had back in Bismarck’s time, and pretend it’s all new, powerful, insightful, contrarian and thought-provoking.
RedKitten
For the love of FSM, man — don’t DO that to us! I made it to page 2, and I swear, I felt like I was reading a gay, unattractive version of Twilight.
Edo
Originally, I thought I’d made it to the end of #4, when I gagged on Douthat saying this:
But every time I try rereading, I wind up getting pushed further back toward the start of the entire exchange.
Wankers gonna wank, I guess.
mclaren
Whenever people ask me about my faith, I tell ’em I believe in physics.
Why does no one talk about “faith” in connection with “faith in logic” or “faith in forensic evidence” or “faith in mathematics backed up by logic and evidence”?
Why is “faith” only applied to fairytales about invisible creatures living in the sky?
the Conster
@Jennifer:
That’s perfect – it means they’re both needle dicks. It explains a lot.
goblue72
Jerry Falwell, Bill Donohue, Rush Limbaugh, Ross Douthat – it’s always the obese, pasty-faced white dorks who obsessively moralize about other people’s sex lives – likely because the only way they can get laid is to pay for it.
cathyx
I read a good part of the exchange and what it sounds like to me is two drunk guys arguing what they think are incredibly insightful positions. But to us sober folks hearing the same arguments, it sounds like utter nonsense.
Bmaccnm
@mclaren: I believe in the principles of asepsis. They’ll bless you every time.
befuggled
@Schad: Which means Ross will probably be dead by then.
Roger Moore
@gaz:
Nah, he’s whining that some state governments insist that adoption agencies that take state money can’t discriminate against gays. Terrible, isn’t it? Apparently the Catholic Church needs to take a remedial course in Matthew 22:21.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Judas Escargot, Your Postmodern Neighbor: I keep thinking of making a shirt that says “I don’t need a god to do the right thing.” Paul eventually says the same thing in the new Testament.
Matoko Borgia-Steeler
Well, having trudged grimly through that preposterous excuse for a debate, I can only say that the sight of two grown men batting coyly at each other with feather dusters was not inspiring.
Addendum: I am seriously considering founding the First Church of Tyrion Lannister. I’ll give Ross Bloody Douthat a heresy to scorch his well-padded backside.
Winston Smith
@gogol’s wife:
Wow, that was exactly the same comment I came to post.
I know that Douthat is an idiot, but it seems that they decided it would be more amusing for him to match wits with another idiot. Will we ever see a time when popular media features discussions between parties who know what they’re talking about?
AA+ Bonds
I’m going to read this whole thing, thanks
I have an interest in exchanges that demonstrate how little people have learned from existentialism
AA+ Bonds
I think a lot of people should really start reading medieval theology and sort of come to grips with the jarring origins of Western thought
My POV is that if you can’t get through this exchange, even given that it’s between two pseudo-intellectuals, you may be out of touch with the United States to a worrisome degree
Gotta learn to think like the enemy
The conversations in this thread about Christian values only reinforce that to me
@Judas Escargot, Your Postmodern Neighbor:
Just knowing Douthat and Saletan, this sounds about right
ruemara
MMmm, while I love a good invite, I think I’ll pass. This looks painful.
Matoko Borgia-Steeler
@Judas Escargot, Your Postmodern Neighbor:
True of Strauss, outside the slightly creepy cult of him among a fairly small group of “conservative” academics. Nietzsche though remains big business – understandably so.
AA+ Bonds
I’m one of those ‘secularists’ who doesn’t think that we’ve worked out any way to sustain Christian values through anything but rule utilitarianism
Douthat would likely read that as a ‘win’ for his side but he can really go fuck himself
Among other problems, I don’t think that most people who report belief in God in the United States hold that belief in a way that can be mapped to, say, the Catholic Church’s doctrine
Jamie
What is I don’t even
As a godless heathen, I would personally like to challenge Mr. Liberal Spokesperson to a heated exchange of words. That splash of Santorum he spread all over Douhat’s Christ Crackers has negative nutritional value, although perhaps washing it down with Christ’s metaphorical blood might have let the words flow more easily.
RSA
@gaz: Good one. Of course, Douthat pointed to one of his own insipid columns, on insurance coverage.
Winston Smith
@Roger Moore:
I strongly recommend getting the “The Message” translation for this kind of study. It is an “idea-to-idea” translation that attempts to put the text into plain modern English using modern idioms. Direct English translations still leave you needing to understand contemporary idioms and attitudes. So, you could read ordinary translations and puzzle over what they fuck this means:
…or you could read “The Message” and understand it:
Oh, and conservatives HATE HATE HATE “The Message,” so that’s a bonus.
AA+ Bonds
There is really a big question of whether theological reasoning has ever applied to social Christianity, and especially loosey-goosey Protestantism
I think a lot of American Christians would agree with the statement that things are good because God says they are good; you can’t expect people to read Euthyphro when laws (supposedly) encode practical aspects of morality to such a high degree of specificity
I mean, you can’t expect people to read Euthyphro anyway with this division of labor – it’s goddamn suicide to waste your working hours on that
mclaren
@Judas Escargot, Your Postmodern Neighbor:
This is an ignorant fallacy from a guy suffering from the onset of tertiary syphilis. Overwhelming evidence from neurobiology and ethology shows that the human moral sense is hardwired into us biologically. The survival value of morality is obvious: without it, how would families persist? Why wouldn’t a father or mother cannibalize their own children when food got scarce? Simple Darwinian macroevolution suffices to explain morality.
Ignorant nonsense like the claim that morality requires a belief in invisible sky fairies shows us that Nietzsche was suffering from syphilitic brain damage when he wrote his allegedly “great works.”
So the secural/liberal values of science evolved out of the older Christian framework? Really? So when Joshua commanded the sun and the moon to stand still, this gave rise to modern science?
Then Joshua spoke to the LORD in the day when the LORD delivered up the Amorites before the sons of Israel, and he said in the sight of Israel, “O sun, stand still at Gibeon, And O moon in the valley of Aijalon.”
Even a small child recognizes that in order to develop, modern secural/liberal values like a belief in the power of mathematics to predict nature had to systematically reject essentially every claim made in the Bible.
Faith in invisible sky fairies requires people to constantly believe in miracles — Zeus appearing in the form of a golden rain and impregnating Danaë (please explain how a golden rain can impregnate a woman: provide peer-reviewed scientific journal articles to back up your assertions), an angel of Yahweh appearing in a burning bush which is not consumed by fire (please cite some examples of bushes which burn but are not consumed by fire) — which utterly contradict everything we know about how nature actually works.
The development of the scientific mathod, of modern mathematics (with wildly counterintuitive results like the Banach-Tarski Paradox or the Borsuk-Ulam Theorem), and of inductive and deductive reasoning, depend in no way on any “older Christian framework.” The development of modern secular/liberal values like the rejection of slavery and genocide requires that we explicitly reject the values of the Bible, which approves of and endorses slavery as well as the genocide of non-believers.
These assertions are ahistorical and provably false. The modern secular/liberal belief system had to fight organized religion tooth and nail to establish itself, as the example of Galileo shows so clearly.
AA+ Bonds
@mclaren:
Don’t be dumb, man, Christ
You want to talk about ahistorical (vs. unhistorical), the above quote is the glass house in which you’re throwing stones
AA+ Bonds
@Roger Moore:
:(
Americans should read parts of the KJV for the same reason they should read a little Shakespeare at some point: so they know what the fuck is up with English
Matoko Borgia-Steeler
@mclaren:
You might want to review the word “simplistic”. What you’ve said is either factually wrong or extremely misleading.
Addendum: yes, erasing it was the better part of valor.
mclaren
@AA+ Bonds:
Your claim is ridiculous on its face. The Christian Bible explicitly and enthusiastically endorses and supports slavery and rape and the genocide of non-believers.
So they sent twelve thousand warriors to Jabesh-gilead with orders to kill everyone there, including women and children. “This is what you are to do,” they said. “Completely destroy all the males and every woman who is not a virgin.” Among the residents of Jabesh-gilead they found four hundred young virgins who had never slept with a man, and they brought them to the camp at Shiloh in the land of Canaan.
In order for modern secular/liberal society to develop, most of the sick twisted values espoused in the Christian Bible had to be abandoned.
Your claims are flatly and self-evidently false. Christianity, as set forth in the Bible, represents a sinkhole of debased bronze-age barbarism which modern society had to abandon in order to become civilized.
jhe
Didn’t even make it through the first paragraph. Atrios should develop a ‘wank’ metric. I suggest this series as the top end of the scale.
Heliopause
@mclaren:
“Faith” has a pretty strong technical meaning in Christianity and I personally try not to use the term except in reference to religion. In fact, I’ve gotten into several internet arguments with people who insist that “atheists have faith every bit as much as Christians do,” which strikes me as strange on many levels, not least that it is denigrating to the very religion that they profess to believe.
Matoko Borgia-Steeler
@mclaren:
“Christianity, as set forth in the Bible, represents a sinkhole of debased bronze-age barbarism”
Given that Jesus lived in the Iron Age….
Not that anyone would expect you to consider the various moments where Christianity confronts its Jewish heritage – e.g. Peter’s Dream in Acts 10.
I am not a Christian, but let’s keep a little sense of reality here.
arguingwithsignposts
@mclaren:
You might want to check which part of the book all those quotes wrt rape came from, skippy.
mclaren
@Matoko Borgia-Steeler:
I didn’t erase my previous post, the goddamn moderation bot did.
Since I added too many links with too much evidence to support my statements of documented fact, the moderation bot ate my post. Therefore I’m reposting it in two parts.
@Judas Escargot, Your Postmodern Neighbor:
This is an ignorant fallacy from a guy suffering from the onset of tertiary syphilis. Overwhelming evidence from neurobiology and ethology shows that the human moral sense is hardwired into us biologically. The survival value of morality is obvious: without it, how would families persist? Why wouldn’t a father or mother cannibalize their own children when food got scarce? Simple Darwinian macroevolution suffices to explain morality.
Ignorant nonsense like the claim that morality requires a belief in invisible sky fairies shows us that Nietzsche was suffering from syphilitic brain damage when he wrote his allegedly “great works.”
So the secular/liberal values of modern science evolved out of the older Christian framework? Really? So when Joshua commanded the sun and the moon to stand still, this gave rise to the scientific method?
Then Joshua spoke to the LORD in the day when the LORD delivered up the Amorites before the sons of Israel, and he said in the sight of Israel, “O sun, stand still at Gibeon, And O moon in the valley of Aijalon.”
Matoko Borgia-Steeler
@mclaren:
You really should have let the moderation bot save you from yourself. It wouldn’t have done the rest of us any harm either.
I’ll confine myself to pointing out that the story that Nietzsche died of syphilis was never very well sourced. The more likely explanation is that he died of brain cancer – specifically a slowly developing brain tumor. But don’t let that get in the way of telling us all about a philosopher whose work you have clearly never read.
Scamp Dog
I made it through the first and most of the second. I succumbed to boredom, not thoughts of suicide. Now if rampant dishonesty and elite insider-mutual congratulation made me think about suicide, the New York Times and Washington Post would have done me in years ago. So there, Cole, you’re wrong!
mclaren
@Judas Escargot, Your Postmodern Neighbor:
Even a small child recognizes that in order to develop, modern secural/liberal values like a belief in the power of mathematics to predict nature had to systematically reject essentially every claim made in the Bible.
Faith in invisible sky fairies requires people to constantly believe in miracles —- Zeus appearing in the form of a golden rain and impregnating Danaë (please explain how a golden rain can impregnate a woman: provide peer-reviewed scientific journal articles to back up your assertions), an angel of Yahweh appearing in a burning bush which is not consumed by fire (please cite some examples of bushes which burn but are not consumed by fire) —- which utterly contradict everything we know about how nature actually works.
The development of the scientific mathod, of modern mathematics (with wildly counterintuitive results like the Banach-Tarski Paradox or the Borsuk-Ulam Theorem), and of inductive and deductive reasoning, depend in no way on any “older Christian framework.” The development of modern secular/liberal values like the rejection of slavery and genocide requires that we explicitly reject the values of the Bible, which approves of and endorses slavery:
However, you may purchase male or female slaves from among the foreigners who live among you. You may also purchase the children of such resident foreigners, including those who have been born in your land. You may treat them as your property, passing them on to your children as a permanent inheritance. You may treat your slaves like this, but the people of Israel, your relatives, must never be treated this way. (Leviticus 25:44-46)
The Christian Bible also enthusiastically approves of the genocide of non-believers:
So they sent twelve thousand warriors to Jabesh-gilead with orders to kill everyone there, including women and children. “This is what you are to do,” they said. “Completely destroy all the males and every woman who is not a virgin.” Among the residents of Jabesh-gilead they found four hundred young virgins who had never slept with a man, and they brought them to the camp at Shiloh in the land of Canaan. (Judges 21:10-24)
Your assertions are ahistorical and provably false. The modern secular/liberal belief system had to fight organized religion tooth and nail to establish itself, as the example of Galileo shows so clearly.
A belief in miracles is a woolly-headed mindset that tells us the universe is fundamentally unpredictable and anything can happen. Belief is miracles requires a rejection of physical law and the abandonment of cause and effect. The foundation of the modern secular/liberal mindset is that the world makes sense and can be understood by the application of reason and physical laws, and that by advancing our knowledge of the physical universe we can improve the human condition. Modern humane standards of morality require that we reject the rape and genocide and slavery so enthusiastically endorsed by the Christian Bible.
Marcellus Shale, Public Dick
i’d rather drink a gallon of cinnamon milk. i mean i tried to, but i just don’t care.
Libby
Not enough booze in the world to get me to read even one back and forth between those two. Or either alone. Not going to waste my beautiful grey matter on their tripe.
4jkb4ia
Naah, the first paragraph is just who Ross Douthat is. I don’t want to kill myself yet. But I have far better things to do with my time than read all ten.
(I understand that Douthat wanted his book to be about the lack of a central Christian culture worthy of the name in the US. I’m skeptical about whether that is a good thing.)
(At least it’s for Christians themselves to decide what they agree on beyond the partisan splits among denominations. It really has nothing to do with me.)
D-boy
I could only read two and that took all the strength i had
DougJ, Head of Infidelity
@Libby:
I think I could get through one of the ten emails with enough booze. But I’d need something stronger to get through any more than that.
Judas Escargot, Your Postmodern Neighbor
@mclaren:
WTF does Joshua have to do with the Sermon on the Mount? You’re just being contrarian.
By ‘liberal values’ I meant things like fairness, equality before the law, the notion that a human being has “rights” which should not be violated. In the West, those values largely came down from the Christians.
Pseudo-scientific claims to an absolute morality are just as pointless, silly and dangerous as the religious ones. For one thing, you can never prove that all human brains are wired in a certain way without examining all 6 billion+ of them. For another, you can’t derive an ought from an is. You can point me to brainscans until the sun turns red, but brainscans cannot compel.
Not even science can get the Subjective out of it– we just end up arguing about how to interpret neurological papers and CAT scans instead of arguing over how to interpret scripture.
Just the same old unresolvable fight, in a different playground.
And BTW, there is no evidence that Nietzsche actually had syphilis. He lacked almost all of the symptoms, for one thing. It was almost certainly a brain cancer (oddly enough, his father had also died of a brain ailment).
Horrendo Slapp (formerly Jimperson Zibb, Duncan Dönitz, Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy, Mumphrey, et al.)
Execrable. I also couldn’t get beyond the first paragraph. And this just jumped out at me:
“The cynic in me is tempted to boil down the message to a tweet: If it feels good, don’t do it.”
Maybe there’s somethng deeply wrong with me, but the first thing I thought of when I read that was, “Jeez, what about helping people? That makes me feel good. I guess he thinks I should stop.”
Now, I know I’m reading him too literally, but in a wider way, this is really what’s wrong with American conservatives: helping people makes them feel bad. They don’t like to help people because, rather than making them feel fulfilled and happy, it just makes them bitter. They sit and spend their lives stewing about how somebody who didn’t deserve a small break got one. What a shitty way to live.
PurpleGirl
I’ve already read a few columns about the Douthat book at Slacktivist and one or two other religion blogs. All these sites tend to the liberal, so they weren’t pleased with the book or Douthat. Since Douthat is a convert to Roman Catholicism, I see much of what he writes/believes as CYA of his decision to convert. (And he’s a jerk.)
Matoko Borgia-Steeler
@Judas Escargot, Your Postmodern Neighbor:
What mclaren is trying to say is quite simple, once you get past the atheist-teabagger fusion talk:
“I am not a witch”.
PurpleGirl
@p.a.: That would nice.
mclaren
@Judas Escargot, Your Postmodern Neighbor:
No, those things come down from Hammurabi, from the Athenian invention of the jury system, and most of all from Roman law.
Christianity systematically denies equality before the law — non-believers don’t have it. Fairness? Yahweh repeatedly commands the Israelites to murder and rape and enslave anyone who isn’t a believer. A human being has “right” which should not be violated? Non-believers don’t have any rights, according to the Bible: the men should be enslaved, and the women should be raped.
If you want to find the origin of fairness and equality before the law, look to the Code of Hammurabi circa 1772 B.C. If you want to see the origin of the concept that citizens have inalienable rights, see the laws introduced by Solon circa 600 B.C.
Compare with the Bible, which instructs us that people who wear cloth woven of two types of threads must be stoned to death, children who disobey their parents must be stoned to death, and anyone who works on the Sabbath must be stoned to death.
These are example of fairness? Of inalienable rights?
mclaren
@Matoko Borgia-Steeler:
What Matoko-Chan is saying is very simple, once you get past the incoherence:
“I’m an ignorant fool.”
slightly-peeved
@Judas Escargot, Your Postmodern Neighbor:
Anyone claiming science knows how the brain is wired doesn’t have the cites; it’s a lot of guesswork and hypotheses at this point. Though one interewsting thing that has come out of the research so far is how much self-delusion is useful, or even necessary, for humans to function. Seligman’s and others work on optimism, showing that optimists aren’t as good at objectively measuring their own performance but are more resilient and successful. The Gorilla experiment, showing how much people’s perceptions are affected by what they expect to see. If people claim that a belief in science prevents them from being deluded, what will they do if science calls bullshit on them?
Matoko Borgia-Steeler
@mclaren:
I fear that Matoko-chan isn’t contributing to this thread, so you’ll have to ask her for her own opinion of these matters – and she’s a Muslim, in any case, so her views on Christianity might well be compatible with yours. The fact remains that you are apparently auditioning to be the Sarah Palin of atheism. As an atheist, I’d appreciate it if you would stop embarrassing the rest of us by being so mindlessly stupid and willfully ignorant.
mclaren
@Judas Escargot, Your Postmodern Neighbor:
Thank you for demonstrating your complete lack of understanding of the scientific method. The scientific method does not attempt to demonstrate that every event in the observable universe follows scientific law X. It merely sets forth scientific law X and then studies whether enough of the observed phenomena follow scientific law X to consider the scientific law valid.
In this case, the principles of Darwinian macroevolution suffice to entirely explain altruism. There’s a great deal of peer-reviewed scientific literature on this, backed up by a vast amount of mathematical population modeling.
For example:
“The evolution of reciprocal altruism,” Robert L. Trivers,
The Quarterly Review of Biology, Vol. 46, No. 1 (Mar., 1971), pp. 35-57.
“The Evolution of Altruistic Behavior,” W. D. Hamilton
The American Naturalist, Vol. 97, No. 896 (Sep. – Oct., 1963), pp. 354-356.
“The evolution of cooperation and altruism – a general framework and a classification of models,” L. Lehmann, L. Keller, Journal of Evolutionary Biology, Volume 19, Issue 5, pages 1365–1376, September 2006.
Please provide the mathematics and experimental evidence to refute these experimental findings, or stand revealed as a crank spouting gibberish.
This is evidently a phrase you heard somewhere, but don’t understand. You’ve fallen in a fundamental logical fallacy here:
No one is saying that anyone or anything “compels” moral behavior in humans. If you’d bother to read these references (which you haven’t), you’d realize that what the researchers are saying is
1) Altruistic behavior is observed throughout the animal kingdom, particularly in mammals;
2) Altruistic behavior is shown to enhance the survival value of groups using mathematical population models of Darwinian macroevolution; therefore…
3) The hypothesis that belief in some supernatural sky fairy is necessary for morality is a superfluous hypothesis. Occam’s Razors tells us to discard it.
The interpretation of CAT scans showing the mammalian limbic system is open to a very limited range of conclusions, as is the interpretation of astronomical observations showing that the earth orbits the sun.
Your claim is as specious and as vacuously sophistical as the assertion: “Not even science can get the subjective out of it — we just end up arguing about how to interpret telescope sightings instead of arguing over how to interpret scripture.”
No, utterly wrong and foolish. No competent or reasonable person can interpret modern astronomical observations to mean that the sun orbits the earth, just as no competent or reasonable person can interpret CAN scans of the limbic system in mammals to mean anything other than that eusociality and empathy are hardwired into mammals by Darwinian evolution.
AA+ Bonds
@mclaren:
Heh yeah the Bible is pretty metal
AA+ Bonds
mclaren, I take back everything
AA+ Bonds
I mean I don’t take back the stuff about medieval theology as the basis for Western thought but I take back things I said previously about you on BJ
AA+ Bonds
mclaren I am interested in what you think of Islam
mclaren
@slightly-peeved:
Provably false.
What you meant to say is “anyone claiming to know how the brain is wired in detail doesn’t have the cites…”
The hardwiring of much of the primate brain is now well known and comprehensively understood in broad overview.
The evidence for my statement is overwhelming: studies of brain damage have irrefutably shown up the broad function of regions like Broca’s region, the left temporal lobe, and so on.
Moreover, neurological and fMRI and PET scan studies have also demonstrated the wiring in broad outline of large segments of the brain from an evolutionary standpoint: we now know that the brain consists of three general regions, the frontal lobes (a recent evolutionary development, responsible for abstract reasoning and spatial manipulation), the limbic system (responsible for eusocial behavior, empathy, and the like) and the R-complex (responsible for extremely basic reflexes like the sex drive, the fight-or-flight reflex, and so on).
If you claim that these documented facts are not well known and have not been comprehensively documented in the scientific literature, you’re either ignorant or lying.
The function of much of the primate brain is now well understood in broad outline. What we don’t yet understand is a lot of the details. But that’s an entirely different question, and it’s a foolish and ignorant fallacy to claim that just because we don’t understand all the minute details of how the human brain is wired, therefore we don’t understand anything about how the human brain is wired.
That’s as fallacious and as foolishly false as the claim that just because we don’t understand the details of how the general theory of relativity combines with quantum mechanics, therefore we can’t predict how gravity operates on a large scale or how quantum particles interact on a small scale.
No, utterly wrong: scientists can use and have used general relativity to make exquisitely detailed predictions with amazing accuracy of very large-scale cosmological phenomena — such as the precession of Mercury’s orbit, which can be observed, and exactly fits with physicists’ predictions made using general relativity. Likewise, scientists can use and have used quantum mechanics to make fantastically detailed predictions with astounding precision of very small-scale events like the transistor gates inside your laptop, which are modeled by software which takes into account the quantum properties of semiconductors.
Your ignorant and foolish claim here has been thoroughly debunked by Isaac Asimov’s essay “The relativity of wrong.” Asimov points out (as I am pointing out) that just because science advances by learning more and more details, that does not make the previous broad outlines of scientific knowledge incorrect.
To paraphrase Asimov, if you think that it’s reasonable to claim that just because we don’t know all the minuscule details of how the primate brain is hardwired, therefore we don’t know the broad outlines of how the primate brain is hardwired…your claim is wronger than the ancient Greek claim that the soul is a puff of air.
hitchhiker
Saletan:
Okay, now you’re just messing with us, right? You don’t have any friends on the left. If you did, you could have asked them this question, and if you had, they would have spit coffee on their shirtfronts and then explained that Rick Santorum said in public that contraception is bad because it lets young, fertile, married people enjoy sex with each other without starting a baby. Your imaginary friends on the left would then have explained that a person with such convictions could say anything at all in the very next breath, and it would not matter. This is how we know you’re a wanker.
Also, gratis factoids about the King James Version of the bible:
1. It was commissioned because the one that most people were reading — the Geneva bible — was written by puritans in Switzerland, and those guys did NOT like the monarchy, so they filled their bible with little commentaries pointing out how unchristian is was to have a king. James got angry about this, so he paid some guys to come up with a new and improved version that had no commentaries or even pictures. The Geneva bible is the one that came over to the new world with the pilgrims, and it’s probably a good example of how people like to see whatever suits them in the bible.
2. King James was known to be a gay man by his own court.
There you go. The bible is not a fixed thing, in spite of the efforts of various factions to act as if it were. It’s always morphing and getting co-opted by this or that gang . . . lately it’s gotten to where the bible publishers are willing to take just about any old sub group and print a bible for them . . the golfer’s bible being my personal favorite. Read some holy text and follow through on your swing, for chrissake.
mclaren
@AA+ Bonds:
Why…I don’t think of it. Anymore than I think about any other organized system of religious belief.
Judas Escargot, Your Postmodern Neighbor
@mclaren:
And those ideas eventually came to the pagan tribes of non-classical Europe via Christianity, to found the core of the modern West.
Those good ideas did come riding piggyback on other, very bad, ideas (as your OT quotes keep mentioning). But those bad ideas are exactly why modern, secular ideas needed to find their own foundations outside of Christianity.
I’m not a Christian and am not really interested in defending it as a religion. If that’s the fight you’re looking for, I’d suggest looking elsewhere.
Commenting at Ballon Juice since 1937
It did? Also Ross doesn’t seem to realize that the U.S. has never been a ‘Catholic’ country. It was founded by the most extreme factions formed after the Reformation (Puriatns, Quakers, etc) and has readily accepted even more narrow minded cults that Christianity has evolved into.
Ruckus
@cathyx:
I’ve read it so you don’t have to.
Plot – thin and ambiguous
Characters – too many prone to douchebaggery and otherwise lacking in humanity
Scenery – very basic could use a little pottery barn or ikea
Takeaway – who the hell knows, but it sure isn’t large sections of organized religion
mclaren
@Judas Escargot, Your Postmodern Neighbor:
But notice that you’re ignoring the really interesting question: namely, where did Hammurabi’s laws and Solon’s laws come from? Why did anyone in the ancient world find it necessary to codify laws and constrain human behavior?
Science gives us an answer. Because altruism increases the survival probability of the group. If parents have no compunctions about murdering their children, or siblings have no qualms have no compunctions about killing one another in their sleep, how long is the group likely to survive? Not very long.
Hamilton’s kin selection theory has mathematically demonstrated this (although it is slightly incorrect to attribute kin selection theory solely to W. D. Hamilton: its earliest appearance is in a book by R. A. Fisher in 1930, and J.B.S. Haldane discusses kin selection in a 1932 book. Moreover, Price gave kin selection its most detailed mathematical model, and Hamilton merely popularized Price’s work and built on it.)
Fisher, R. A. (1930). The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Haldane, J.B.S. (1932). The Causes of Evolution. London: Longmans, Green & Co.
Haldane, J. B. S. (1955). “Population Genetics”. New Biology 18: 34–51.
Hamilton, W. D. (1963). “The evolution of altruistic behavior”. American Naturalist 97 (896): 354–356.
Hamilton, W. D. (1964). “The Genetical Evolution of Social Behavior”. Journal of Theoretical Biology 7 (1): 1–16.
Smith, J. M. (1964). “Group Selection and Kin Selection”. Nature 201 (4924): 1145–1147
No imaginary sky fairies are required for altruism to emerge in groups. Altruism emerges from the mathematics of the selfish gene as a consequence of population genetics.
And kin selection theory is not merely confirmed by the math, kin selection theory has been also repeatedly confirmed by field observations: see, for example, “The benefits of social capital: close social bonds among female baboons enhance survival,” Joan B. Silk et al., Proceedings of the Royal Society B., 2009, Vol. 276, pp. 3099-3104.
Moreover, science also gives an answer to the question “Why do humans experience empathy?” Because empathy allows us to model the minds and therefore the likely future behavior of other creatures, and therefore it increases the probability of survival of the creatures which have empathy.
Consider, for example, the well-documented (and truly amazing) practice of persistence hunting. In order to track the animal for many hours, the human must form a mental model of the animal’s behavior, and this requires empathy. Notice in this video how the hunter expresses reverence for the animal before he kills it. This is the result of empathy, and it probably explains why early humans worshiped animals (like the animal-headed gods of the Egyptians, or the golden calf described in the Bible). Empathy, which is evolutionarily necessary for persistence hunting on the savannahs in which the earliest humans evolved, naturally leads humans to regard animals respectfully.
Musing about invisible sky fairies leads us to no answers and no new information about morality. By contrast, population genetics and the mathematics of kin selection leads us to deduce empathy and eusociality as a basic consequence of the mathematics of Darwinian selection applied to groups.
mclaren
@Judas Escargot, Your Postmodern Neighbor:
In actual fact, it was Islamic scholars who preserved most of the literature and mathematics and science of the ancient world while fanatical Christians were busily burning those ancient manuscripts for their alleged “heresies.”
So, ironically, if we want to thank anyone for preserving the knowledge of the pre-Christian West, it should be the religion of Islam. Something that today’s anti-terror warriors with their frenzied fear of Islam seem to have utterly forgotten.
Bludger
That….was fucking horrible. I read the whole thing.
mclaren
Saletan’s entire argument seems to boil down to the “no true Scotsman” fallacy. Anything Saletan doesn’t like about Christianity, he dismissed as “not real Christianity” — or, in his words, not part of orthodox Christianity.
We can use the same “argument” to defend Pol Pot’s Year Zero. The killing fields and the torture weren’t part of “orthodox Year Zero.” But the basic idea of Year Zero was great!
Puh-lease.
Judas Escargot, Your Postmodern Neighbor
@mclaren:
It’s difficult to refute papers that one agrees with. (I don’t expect you to know what I do for a living, nor am I interested in outing myself).
But those are papers in game theory. They study optimal behaviors among abstract populations of independent actors, which is all that game theory can do. Nice papers on game theory (derivatives of those algorithms are used in networking and security applications to this day), but they can tell me nothing about morals.
They don’t tell me how to structure a government. They don’t tell me anything interesting about what kinds of social arrangements are possible. They don’t tell me what “rights” I am really entitled to, as opposed to privileges or preferences. And they certainly don’t tell me what gods to believe or disbelieve in.
The is/ought dichotomy (which I understand reasonably well, thank you) comes from Hume, but the problem itself is much older, as you should know. “This is the architecture of your limbic system, therefore you must call your sick mother on Sundays” will never be a coherent sentence. You can never logically derive a specific moral fact (I mean ‘specific’ with regards to a single given choice or action) from an abstracted physical law.
Science will never provide us with any kind of perfect, absolute moral code, because that is not its purpose or function.
In your eagerness for science, you’re indulging in scientism.
4jkb4ia
I am going to cheer Ross Douthat for taking a completely softball question and giving the excellent example that orthodoxy expects the second coming and fundamentalism maps it all out in the Left Behind books.
At least I thought it was a completely softball question. Then I realized over dinner that Karen Armstrong in 2001 wasn’t willing to define what fundamentalism was. I would definitely posit rigidity, the same way that Douthat did. Fundamentalism is scared of any idea that doesn’t explicitly have a source in a sacred text. Orthodoxy posits a tradition, and that it comes from God, but also posits that people can add to it and use secular learning to add to it. Aviva Zornberg is an outstanding example of how this might be done.
But this isn’t on a level that I have to read the next 8 installments.
Judas Escargot, Your Postmodern Neighbor
@mclaren:
Then why does Paul Ryan exist?
mclaren
@Judas Escargot, Your Postmodern Neighbor:
Neither does the Bible.
Now you’re moving the goalposts. The original claim was that belief in invisible sky fairies is necessary for morality. You now appear to have conceded the point that it isn’t, and now you’ve moved on to an entirely different assertion.
The particular form of government in which human notions of morality are embodied is entirely different from the assertion that human morality emerges from the mathematics of population genetics.
Incidentally, I am not making the claim that any particular form of government results from the mathematics of population genetics or from Darwinian selection.
I merely assert that the evidence is conclusive and convincing that a sense of morality, a sense of empathy, and eusociality in humans emerge from nothing more than the selfish gene and the math of population genetics.
Once again, you’re moving the goalposts. The question is not whether science can provide us with “any kind of perfect, absolute moral code,” but whether science can provide us with an explanation for why the human moral sense exists. I contend that science provides that explanation, courtesy of Darwinian selection and the mathematics of population genetics. If we were space aliens from Arcturus and we didn’t know that human morality or human empathy or human altruism or human eusociality existed, we would be forced to deduce it given Darwinian selection and the mathematics of population genetics.
4jkb4ia
@Judas Escargot, Your Postmodern Neighbor:
Neil Sinhababu teaches Nietzsche, so that’s hyperbole.
I think what Nietzsche was getting at was that people who congratulate themselves on their secular values are really only adopting religious values that can be supported by reason. They are not seeing the world through the lens of independent reason the way they think they are doing.
mclaren
@Judas Escargot, Your Postmodern Neighbor:
Studies show that approximately 1% of the human population are sociopaths, lacking in conscience or a moral sense.
A better question would be: Why do studies show that sociopaths who score highly on Hare’s checklist seem to be four times as common in positions of power in large corporations and in politics than in the general population?
We might deduce that perhaps there’s something wrong with the social-economic arrangement known as “capitalism” that makes it prone to this dysfunction…
4jkb4ia
@mclaren:
The same OT that specifies these harsh punishments also says that they apply whether someone is rich or poor, that you should not oppress a stranger, and that judges should not accept bribes or follow the majority for evil. And that is a legal system that not only did Paul reject to create Christianity, but the sages of the Talmud tried to emphasize that it was extremely difficult to put someone to death in. You needed two witnesses, who warned the person. That is just the first thing I can think of.
zephyr
I was listening to Douthat talk about his book with Diane Rehm the other day. It didn’t take long before I was yelling at the radio and wanting to pull my hair out. What a pompous, presumptuous and clueless wanker. Clearly he was in love with his opinions though, however nonsensical they are.
Judas Escargot, Your Postmodern Neighbor
@mclaren:
.
Not by me.
A Christian’s values derive ultimate from their belief in the Christ myth. Now take the Jesus out: How do you keep the parts that you want to keep? Using your reason?
That’s the past few centuries, still in progress.
@4jkb4ia:
I wish I could be this succinct.
mclaren
@Judas Escargot, Your Postmodern Neighbor:
Oh, and in case it isn’t obvious, sociopathy is now thought to be a genetic defect of some kind resulting in abnormal brain function. PET brain scans of sociopaths are so abnormal that they can be reliably spotted by trained observers in blind trials. In sociopaths certain parts of the brain exhibit grossly subnormal function: specifically, the superior orbital cortex exhibits markedly subnormal metabolism in sociopaths. See:
“Neuroanatomical Background to Understanding the Brain of the Young Psychopath,” Fallon, James H., 3 Ohio St. J. Crim. L. 341 (2005-2006)
mclaren
@4jkb4ia:
This assertion is vacuous because it’s impossible to disprove. Every possible value has at some time or another been held by some religion, from torture to human sacrifice to infant sacrifrice, to…you name it, from the Aztecs (infant sacrifice) to the Sioux indians of America (torture as one of their sacred rituals), etc.
So any possible moral value one can espouse as the result of reason has at some time or another been previously espoused by a religion. This makes it impossible to espouse any moral value which has not been previously held up as an alleged virtue by some religion. According to this reasoning, therefore, no moral value can be supported by reason.
But that’s plainly and obviously false, because when you look at the mathematics of Price’s and Hamilton’s kin selection, some behaviors consistently come out of the mathematics, and others don’t. Infanticide doesn’t. Altruism does.
So this argument by Nietzsche is yet another worthless sophistry. It’s as empty and as vacuous as the sophistical assertion that since pre-scientific peoples used the salicylic acid from boiled tree bark to cure headaches, therefore modern aspirin (salicylic acid) has not been demonstrated by science to be useful against headaches. No, utterly fallacious, an obvious and flagrant failure of basic logic.
4jkb4ia
Do you have to believe in God to have a moral sense?
No. And you can believe in God and be an utter sociopath.
If behaving empathetically is rational, then believing in God gets you nothing extra. But to calibrate the part of you that is irrational, believing in a personal God may give you something. It may give you something to measure your emotions against. It is easy for scientists such as mclaren and Steven Weinberg to reject the idea of God because their science provides them the opportunity for awe and humility at something greater than them.
Tony the Wonderhorse
Yeah, I tried reading them last week but stopped. Intelligent debate is a form of intercourse, I don’t mind idiots masturbating but I prefer they do it in private.
mclaren
@4jkb4ia:
I don’t reject the idea of God. I’m simply uninterested in the question of whether God exists. I find God or gods a superfluous hypothesis since as far as I can tell it can neither be proven nor disproven by any possible evidence.
But if someone provided me with hard evidence that gods or God interacted in some visible way with the observable universe, I would certainly become very interested in the question of whether God or gods exist.
In that sense I view questions about the putative existence of God in same way as issues of string theory: since in neither case has anyone made any predictions based on these hypotheses which can possibly be confirmed by any observation you could possibly make, in neither case is the issue of any concern to me.
Incidentally, it seems to me that this forms the core of the modern liberal/secular mindset, which is in essence pragmatic. Show me the evidence. A liberal/secular humanist makes decisions based on the evidence rather than spouting rigid ideology. It seems to me the distinguishing characteristic of the hardcore ultraconservatives today is that they maintain their policy positions regardless of whether the evidence comprehensively contradicts them. (Classic example: abstinence-only sex ed, which surveys of STDs and teen pregnancy have shown does not work.) A liberal secular humanist views the evidence, and if more evidence comes in, the liberal secular humanist changes hi/r mind and espouses a different set of policies.
4jkb4ia
@mclaren:
OK, not religious values. Christian values. Nietzsche had no use for Christianity whatsoever but found some redeeming values in Judaism occasionally. His line was that Christianity got rid of the only idea, the holy people, in Judaism that still made sense.
If I try to write about where Nietzsche thought morality should come from, I’m going to make a hash of it. But I remember, “Raphael said Yes; Raphael DID Yes; consequently, Raphael was no Christian.” The important thing is to, in Syrio Forel-ese, to look with your eyes and affirm what you see with your eyes once you have thought it through.
TooManyJens
I couldn’t help noticing that Saletan never asked Douthat why any of the rest of us should give a shit about what Douthat believes. He can believe whatever the fuck he wants; I don’t really care. My problem is that he wants his religion’s rules written into public policy.
mclaren
Nietzsche made real contributions to aesthetics. His essay “The Birth of Tragedy” made a distinction twixt Dionysian and Appollonian modes of aesthetics which holds true today.
But Nietzsche’s writing on religion and morality seems confused and incoherent. For example:
That’s dumb. Science specifically eschews moral or aesthetic values. You can only do science by removing emotional and moral values and reducing the world to numbers and observations. You might observe that certain properties like altruism become emergent in population genetics, but that doesn’t tell you anything about whether such properties should be encouraged in society or in individual people.
Or consider:
He doesn’t seem to have read Kant, which is truly astonishing in a philosopher. Kant distinguished twixt two types of truth: evidence from pure reason, such as the conclusion that given A > B and B > C, therefore A > C, and evidence from the senses. Truth arises from both sources. According to Kant, reason provides the structure of what we know, while the senses provide the content.
As Jacob Bronowski pointed out, the Greeks were quite as rational as we are. The Greeks and Romans and Assyrians and Babylonians did not fall short in terms of their ingenuity or their capacity to reason. Where they fell short was in failing to continuously subject the products of their reason to the acid test of experiment, and then refine their mental models and test them again. As Bronowski points out, it is the continual back-and-forth between reason and observation that makes the scientific method so powerful, and that has transformed the world so greatly since the 16th century. Nietzsche seems utterly unaware of any of this, which is simply bizarre for someone writing in the 19th century.
Again, Nietzsche proves himself absurd when he claims:
This certainly proves true in politics, and to a lesser extent in the arts (can anyone be taken seriously if he claims, for example, that Hamlet is a play about a guy who has a homosexual liason with his uncle the king?) but it is not true at all of mathematics or most of the hard sciences.
You can’t interpret the equation 2 + 2 = 4 to mean that 2 + 2 = 5. You can’t interpret the theory of universal gravitation to mean that all orbits must be perfectly circular, as the ancient Greeks did. Nietzsche simply didn’t know what he was talking about when he says stuff like this.
So if a civilian says “I’m going to kill you” to an unarmed victim in front of you and then shoots the victim in the head, he’s not guilty of murder? Or shouldn’t feel guilty?
That doesn’t make sense.
Nietzsche had some real insights to offer in certain areas like literary criticism, but a great deal of what he wrote seems to be incoherent gibberish, especially when it comes to religion and morality.
Pat In Massachusetts
The motto for columnists (except for Krugman) at the New York Times is “Let’s talk about anything except the unemployed American and how the federal and state governments are doing absolutely nothing about it.” “Religion” and “secularism” seem to be the flavor of the season and the reason why 10 free reads per month from the New York Times suits me just fine.