patoadam

Recently, I told a friend of mine that I have trouble understanding the Bible. Different denominations interpret it in radically different ways. Different translations say different things. I don't trust any particular religious authority to tell me what the Bible means. Why is one religious authority more likely to be right than any other?

My friend said that maybe different people are supposed to interpret the Bible differently. More generally, perhaps it's a feature, not a bug, that different people have different religious beliefs.

In seeking inspiration for what to say here, I re-read an inspiring speech by Harold Feld. How can a speech about community wireless networks be inspiring? Well, it is also about why and how we should strive to make a better world. At one point, Harold touches on how the Passover seder is explained to children. He says that we give each child a different explanation, because we have a responsibility to try to reach each child in the place where he or she is now.

In the same manner, perhaps God or the Dao or the cosmic microwave background radiation touches each of us in a different way, in the way that is best for each of us, and that is why we have different religions.

"There are as many ways to God as there are people." -- Joseph Ratzinger, 1995
(Thanks to eintx for pointing out this quote.)

"If there's a God, your purpose is to LIVE. To help people. To make the world a better place. And if there's NOT a God... your purpose is to LIVE! To help people! To make the world a better place!"
-- Tom Smith, 2006

"Jews, Christians, and Muslims all believe in God and the Prophets. They just have a few minor disagreements about who the Prophets are." -- anonymous friend

"So believe in God in Heaven, or believe in hearth and home
That the children are our future, or that we are not alone
Just believe that something matters, and believe with heart and soul
For the act of believing is what keeps us whole."
-- Harold Feld

I would like to know why people hold the political opinions they do and vote the way they do. (Translation: Why doesn't everyone agree with my obviously correct political opinions and vote the way I do?) I have listed some popular explanations below. I should mention that the brief summaries I give do not do justice to the writers' nuanced arguments.

How can I tell which hypotheses are correct? Or are they all correct, as in the parable of the blind men and the elephant? Or is it impossible to answer "why" questions, because correlation does not imply causation? Can you suggest other theories I'm not familiar with?

Conservatives are authoritarian; liberals aren't.
Mark J. Hetherington and Jonathan D. Weiler, Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics

Conservatives come from strict-father families; liberals come from nurturant-parent families.
George Lakoff, The Political Mind and Don't Think of an Elephant

Conservative are more easily squicked than liberals.
See this article

Morality is based on five principles: caring for others, fairness/reciprocity, group loyalty, respect for authority, and purity/sanctity. Liberals base their beliefs on the first two principles; conservatives base their beliefs on all five principles.
Jonathan Haidt, as described at moralfoundations.org

Political opinions are based on emotion, not reasoning.
The Political Brain, by Drew Westen

Blue-collar workers, who used to be liberal for economic reasons, have become increasingly conservative because conservative politicians have increasingly emphasized social issues such as abortion and gay marriage.
Thomas Frank, What's the Matter With Kansas?

Turducken
with apologies to Joyce Kilmer

I think that I shall never dine
on beef or bison, sheep or swine,
or doe or any of her buck kin
as tasty as a good turducken.

You need three birds to make turducken.
My word! It takes a lot of pluckin'.
Debone a chicken. Get it stuck
within a finger-lickin' duck.
Stuff both within a turkey's core.
Your dinner guests will beg for more.

Three birds have ceased their daily cluckin'.
They form the feast we call turducken.
Turducken's the dish for fools like me.
Not only God is One in Three.

Our friends N. and R. invited us to their annual holiday dinner. The 60 or so guests enjoyed quite a feast. Turducken was served, which inspired my poem. Guests brought side dishes.

It is a holiday dinner tradition for each guest to say what he or she is thankful for. I said I was thankful for my chihuahua, my son, and my wife, not necessarily in that order.

Happy Holidays to all!

P.S. If you liked my poem, you absolutely must read Poems by Tom Disch.

Fanthem

by patoadam
completed Oct. 24, 2008
placed in the public domain
MIDI here.

I took the melody for the verses, with some minor changes, from the Discovery Channel commercial "I Love the World". The melody used in that commercial was taken, in turn, from the traditional song "I Love the Daffodils". The melody for the choruses is mine, AFAIK.

C           Am
 We are the fanfolk.
Dm7            G7
 We read three books a day.
C            Am
 We keep the goblins
Dm7            G7
 And grues and ghouls at bay.
C          Am
 In pink pajamas
Dm7           G7
 We roam the Milky Way.

	C  Am
	Fandom
	Dm7        G7
	Infinite Diversity

( Read more... )

Thanks to khaosworks and someone else (I forget who) for pointing out "I Love the World" on LJ. The first time I heard it, I said to myself, "I really like that song. Why don't I write something about fandom to that tune? Naah, the chord progression is too repetitive." It wasn't until someone else pointed out ILtW that I decided to write this song.

Sad news. Filker Jim Rousey passed away on May 12. Lee Gold just heard of Jim's passing from Jim's brother, and posted to rec.music.filk.

Jim was a frequent contributor to Xenofilkia. Of his many wonderful songs, I remember two very fondly: "You've Got To Eat Up Your Liver", which Kathy Mar often sings; and "Life Is Hard, and Then You Die", which has suddenly become tragically appropriate.

I did not know Jim well at all, so there isn't really anything else I can add.

Jim's brother wrote:

"I know how much Jim loved filk music... I listed filk music in Jim's obituary as an interest. All the newspapers, except San Francisco, tried to correct the spelling to folk and I had to educate them."

Here is a wonderful poem, by one Bob Newman, that retells the story of Good King Wenceslas. Note that it scans beautifully to "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel". You just have to add an extra line to the melody, because the song has six lines and the poem has seven.

Ed Stauff graciously put a four-part harmony arrangement of "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel" here, so we have all the ingredients we need for a wonderful performance.

Who would like to sing this in four-part harmony at GaFilk? I can provide sheet music and midi with the extra line folded in.

Please email me if you are interested, and tell me what part you sing. I need to know in advance whether we have volunteers for all four parts, because I won't bother to prepare the sheet music if we don't.

Happy Boxing Day, aka the Feast of Stephen!

P.S.

Where do we add the extra line to the melody? I prefer singing the fifth line of the poem to a repetition of the second line of the "Emmanuel" melody.

When will we perform the song at GaFilk? It seems appropriate for the Ecumenifilk (even though, strictly speaking, it isn't a religious song), or we could do it in the 2x10s. The Powers That Be tell me that everybody in the performance except me would be free to do another 2x10. I think we would have to get together once before the performance to run through the song.

Here is a possibly boring political screed that you probably won't read because you're tired of that sort of thing by now. It was inspired by the recent discussion on my friends' list of whether all Republicans are evil and stupid. In general, I don't think Republicans are evil or stupid, but I do think the current Republican administration is incompetent.

If the Republican administration were competent...

They wouldn't have proposed a goofy Social Security reform plan that would have increased the indebtedness of Social Security by trillions of dollars.

The person they put in charge of FEMA would have had expertise in emergencies instead of in Arabian horses.

They wouldn't have put up on the Internet a guide to building an atomic bomb, written in Arabic, based on Iraq’s nuclear research before the 1991 Persian Gulf war.


When they invaded Afghanistan, they wouldn't have waited nearly five months after they began their invasion before sending U.S. troops to look for Osama bin Laden. ( cut to preserve your sanity )

"In order for us to send thousands of troops into a sovereign nation, we've got to be invited by the government."

-- President George W. Bush, Sept. 15, 2006

Quoted by Molly Ivins in Another Look at Bush's Rose Garden Press Conference (registration required).

Stephen Hawking is afraid that global warming threatens the survival of the human species over the next 100 years. Maybe I should pay more attention to this issue.

Here is a transcript of his comments:

How can the human race survive the next hundred years? I don't know the answer. That is why I asked the question -- to get people to think about it, and to be aware of the dangers we now face.

Before the 1940s, the main threat to our survival came from collisions with asteroids. Such collisions had caused mass extinctions in the past, but the last one was 70 million years ago. So the likelihood that we will need the services of Bruce Willis in the next hundred years is very small.

A much more immediate danger is nuclear war. America and Russia each have more than enough warheads to kill everyone on earth several times over, and the same may now be true of China. The world came perilously close to nuclear annihilation on more than one occasion in the last 50 years. With the ending of the Cold War, the threat has become less acute, but it has not gone away. There are still enough nuclear weapons stockpiled to kill us all, and their use might be triggered by an accident that convinced a country that it was under attack.

There is now a new danger from small and potentially unstable countries acquiring nuclear weapons. Such minor nuclear powers might cause millions of deaths, but they would not threaten the survival of the entire human race unless they sparked a conflict between the major powers.

These dangers of asteroid collision and nuclear war have now been joined by a host of other threats to our survival.

Climate change is happening at an ever-increasing rate. While we are hoping to stabilize it and maybe even reverse it by reducing our CO2 emissions, the danger is that the climate change may pass a tipping point at which the temperature rise becomes self-sustaining. The melting of the Arctic and Antarctic ice reduces the amount of solar energy that is reflected back into space, and so increases the temperature further. The rise in sea temperature may trigger the release of large quantities of CO2 trapped at the bottom of the ocean, which will further increase the greenhouse effect. Let's hope we don't end up like our sister planet, Venus, with a temperature of 250 degrees centigrade, and raining sulfuric acid.

There are other dangers, such as the accidental or intentional release of a genetically engineered virus. Each time we increase our technological powers, we add new possible ways in which things could go disastrously wrong. The human race faces an increasingly dangerous future.

There's a sick joke that the reason we haven't been visited by aliens is that when a civilization reaches our stage of development, it because unstable and destroys itself. In fact, I think there are other reasons why we haven't seen any aliens, but the story shows how perilous the situation is.

The long-term survival of the human race will be safe only if we spread out into space and to other stars. This won't happen for at least a hundred years, so we have to be very careful. Perhaps we must hope that genetic engineering will make us less and less aggressive.

I thought that this article about Dorkbot meetings, an unusual format for creative ideas, might be of interest to my friends who feel that every act of creation is an act of faith, joy, hope, and love.

By the way, when Cat Faber wrote that "every act of creation is an act of faith," I thought that she meant that a creative act is a mitzvah (I hope I am using the word right), a worthy deed pleasing to God. When I asked Cat about it, she told me that that wasn't what she meant at all. I still like the phrase.