An evangelical journalist Lee Strobel offers “13 reasons to believe God created the universe.” Strobel says:
In contrast, however, the portrait of the Creator that emerges from the scientific data is uncannily consistent with the description of the God whose identity is spelled out in the pages of the Bible.
I disagree, but who cares. Read the “13 reasons,” they seem really badly framed in the excerpt of the text that Belieftnet has put up.
Posted by razib at 04:08 AM
You might want to track the Cassini/Huygens site (always on the sidebar) as the probe nears Titan.
Posted by razib at 01:40 AM
WaPo reports the end of the dominance of the Democratic Party over the Jewish vote, with Orthodox Jews now turning to the GOP.
Jews, however, were different. As late as 2000, Al Gore and his Orthodox running mate, Joe Lieberman, didn’t just win most of the Jewish vote, they won a large majority among Orthodox Jews — the “traditionalists” whom sociologists might have expected to join their Christian counterparts. But it now appears that, like Jimmy Carter, who won the votes of his fellow evangelicals in 1976, Lieberman simply delayed his community’s migration into the Republican Party. This year, for probably the first time, Orthodox Jews will vote like “traditionalist” Christians. Conservative, Reform and non-affiliated Jews, on the other hand, will vote like secular, or “modernist,” Christians. And the Jewish vote, in a meaningful sense, will cease to exist.
But I wonder if this is smart on the part of the Orthodox community. With the vile, paranoid, pathological, bigoted hatred usually directed at traditional GOP groups (Evangelicals, Cubans, etc) by the neo-fascist left, I wonder if a community that has found only a handful of countries throughout history that would accept them can afford to outrage the nuts in our society.
Cross Posted at Organic republican
Posted by scottm at 09:44 PM
My new blog is up (yes GNXP is branching out in all different directions) check it out.
Posted by scottm at 08:56 PM
Steve Sailer will be on FOX NEWS Tuesday at 8:44 AM Eastern Time. Contra Dog of Justice over at Thras’s blog this Kerry/Bush/IQ story has turned into a major scoop.
Posted by razib at 10:30 AM
BBC 4’s In our Time has some excellent 45 minute discussions with intellectuals about major topics archived.
For example….
Out of the history archive, Romans in Britain.
Out of the science archive, The Physics of Reality.
Out of the religion archive, The Norse Gods.
Out of the culture archive, The Scottish Enlightenment.
Out of the philosophy archive, Human Nature.
Posted by razib at 06:33 PM
John Tooby relates this nice anecdote in an old Slate piece:
Bill Hamilton of Oxford, originator of the concept of inclusive fitness and other theories fundamental to modern evolutionary biology, winner of the Kyoto and Crafoord Prizes, and first president of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, gave a toast at a banquet at an evolutionary biology conference several years ago. From the podium, with dancing eyes, he lifted his glass and announced that he was going to toast Gould—and the audience of hundreds fell dead silent, holding their breath in expectation of a joke to follow. They were not disappointed: Hamilton said that despite the confused and incoherent nature of Gould’s publications on evolutionary biology, we should celebrate him anyway, because of the harvest of bright children—future biologists—that his essays would bring into the field. The audience dissolved in laughter and cheers.
Ol’ Bill was at least half right.
Posted by God Fearing Atheist at 10:01 PM
Via Sepia comes this article in The New York Times about caste in the United States. Being from a Muslim family I’ve never heard anything about caste in the United States. After getting to know a few brown Americans in more detail caste has been mentioned now and then so I have inquired among brown Muslims I have met through the web about the salience of this social structure among them and everyone claims they have never noted its persistance in the US. In South Asia Muslims do have caste, but my hypothesis is that it can only flourish in a South Asian context because unlike Hinduism Islam does not explicitly condone it, so without the support of a cultural matrix it dissolves (the rhetorical social egalitarianism of American society has its Muslim cognate).
But I wanted to focus on one snippet from the article:
…And Dr. Das’s losing battle to uphold tradition is about to suffer yet another setback: a grandson plans to marry a non-Indian Christian from Chicago whom he met at Harvard.
I have debated with Manish the possible future extent of inter-ethnic marriage and the eventual solvation of the South Asian identity because of this porcess several times (see here). Nevertheless, I grant that one of Manish’s points, that the younger South Asians have a more articulated and concrete brown identity is probably correct (though we differ on the degree of importance this might have in reversing the trend toward inter-ethnic marriage).
You see, my sister watches Hindi movies.
What’s wrong with that say you? Well, nothing. But of late I have realized that she is an example of the kind of ethnic identity formation that Manish has spoken of. I have two siblings about 15 years younger than me, and one who is only 4 years younger. In many ways we are two generations, and perhaps the most striking one is that in some ways the younger generation, especially my sister (thank god my youngest brother seems more interested in video games), are more explicitly brown-identified.
I believe there are two major factors that influence this.
1) A larger brown community means that she has peers who are brown (peers really matter!).
2) She has recounted to me episodes where her teacher approvingly suggested that she speak about her “heritage,” and it is quite clear her “diversity” is encouraged and looked upon positively by the school system (I started noting that by the end of high school I started to become “educational” and teachers would want me to speak about Islam and my own view of God, which was hard since I was in an atheist).
On the first point, I was not always the only South Asian kid in any given educational circumstance, but generally there were only two of us and I never felt any need to form a friendship with someone else because of their racial similarity to me (in fact, when there are only a few co-ethnics in a population I would not be surprised if a repulsive force would be at work because a group of 2 or 3 just increases your alien profile without being large enough to give you the benefits of a clique). On the second score, though my ethnic identity was obvious to my teachers and friends, there was little comment on it. In fact, I remember my 6th grade teacher, a white liberal supporter of Jesse Jackson, expressing unconcealed disgust when I mentioned offhand that my parents had an arranged marriage. She blurted out, “that’s medieval.” I can’t imagine a white liberal teacher saying something like that today with the rise of multiculturalism (though those who are younger might educate me on this, and there is no doubt great inter-regional variance on this issue).
So certainly I grant some of what Manish is saying. Nevertheless, I constantly make fun of my sister for her preference in movies, and note that she has many non-South Asian friends (her South Asian friends still tend to be separated by distance since they live in neighboring communities). This would not be an issue in many large urban areas where critical mass has been attained and the process of congealing of an ethnic minority can proceed faster.
I think a good analogy is to imagine a large jawbreaker vs. an equivalent volume jawbreaker broken up into 100 pieces. Clearly the latter would melt in your mouth first. My own personal preference is to work for policies that break the jawbreaker to pieces. That is why I prefer a education based immigration system (well educated professionals move more often and meet non-co-ethnics in the workplace). Also, moderating the stream of immigration would staunch the flood of new people from the old country that would be the gluten in the cake of identity.
Posted by razib at 10:45 AM
Link from Steve Sailer. You aren’t as smart as you think you are.
Wow. Just read it.
Posted by Thrasymachus at 04:41 PM