Early 90s rap theology

Loving the developments over at Katay’s blog.

I must, however, ask: Who’s down with OPP?

The “God spot”, and 3 questions to ask a Christian about God

Earlier tonight a friend of mine asked me what I thought of the “God spot” in the brain (that is, a suggested neurophysiological basis for mystical/religious experience)

It seems obvious that this is no anti-God argument for the atheist, and it doesn’t even devalue religious experience. Even the articles I linked above say “It is not the final reduction of God to mere neurophysiology”, however I feel it is worthwhile to spell this argument out.

So here we go

1. The brain is the ultimate sensor we possess, for physical and emotional sensation, in fact, there is no experience we have which is not mediated by the brain.
   
2. The taste of a fine steak, the anticipation of seeing a loved one from whom you have been separated, the thrill of winning a sporting competition – all these will excite different parts of the brain.
3. Understanding the part of the brain responsible for the enjoyment of food, or relationship, or achievement does not lead us to question the meaning of a meal, a reunion, or a victory.
4. Mystical experience exists. People have experiences of transcendence.
5. When we ask “Is a mystical experience real?”, we really mean “Does that experience mean anything”.
6. We may well say “It’s just an excitation, a “lighting up” of the ‘God spot’ ” ; however; in the same way a fortunate person present for the Gettysburg address may have said “It’s just an excitation of my auditory and visual centres in my brain”
7. The point is, the explanation of how an experience came to be tells you its genesis (be careful of the genetic fallacy!) not its meaning
8. In the same way, an explanation of how a Christian feels about God tells us nothing about that feeling’s meaning.
9. For example, if a Christian says “I love God”, the fact we know what part of the brain is responsible tells us no more about God than we already know, that is, that this Christian says he or she loves Him.
   
10. In particular, it tells us nothing about the object of this love.

Assuming you are an honest inquirer, the way to find out about the object of the Christian’s love is to ask questions. Suppose  you were about to say to our God-loving Christian: “Your religious experience is merely the excitation of the “God spot” in your temporal lobe”, but then you remembered this post and thought better of it. Here are some questions which I think have the same thrust but may yield more enlightening answers:

1. How can you love someone you can’t see?
2. What do you mean when you say you love God? Is it the same way you love your parents, or spouse, or friends?
3. But how do you know God loves you back? Anything you feel or that happens to you might be accounted for by natural explanations!

As a Christian, I’d be delighted to be asked these questions.

My infallible 4 step study plan to learn anything in 15 minutes

So I think I’ve discovered an extremely powerful study method.

You will need

• “Source material” – that is, a brief (digestible) summary written by someone else – a summary-style textbook, or a wikipedia article, or anything!
• An A4 notebook and a pen
• An alarmed timing device
• A flash card (small)

Now on to the steps

1. Set your timer for 10 minutes. In that 10 minutes write down (and organise in a logical fashion) all the important information from your source material.
2. When you reach the 10 minute mark, STOP. Do not cheat
3. Read over the notes you have made, and formulate 5 intelligent questions (eg. “Compare and contrast NSTEMI and STEMI” rather than “Name 3 risk factors for myocardial infarction”). Write them on the index card. Label the other side with the topic
4. Put your notes away. Now your task is to speak about your topic (the front of the index card) using your intelligent questions as prompts. Ideally do this to an audience of your peers.

And that is it! I’ve just started using this method and am finding it really gives excellent results!

Blog re-initiate?

I love thinking and sharing my thoughts. I’ll try to put any up here if I have some

iBlog 2.0

If I were launching a new version of an iconic australian spread, I would recognise the impossibility of a “this is a good product” style of campaign, and instead give it a comically bad name, generating interest (and sales) with very little advertising outlay

morality and mocking

I  was driving down the beautiful Mt Ousley road the other night when I switched my radio to Triple J’s Hack program. The topic for the night was explicit text messaging and MMSing, and the legal ramifications for the youth engaging in it.

One of the discussants (I surmised him to be a teenager from one of the catholic youth organisations) said something to the effect of

“What our youth need is not more laws, but greater discernment and moral fibre”

At which point one of the other experts (who sounded much older) began openly mocking, interrupting the young speaker. “Moral FIBRE,” he  scoffed.

The presenter handled the situation well, but when given the chance to speak, the older speaker said

“I do not believe in any such thing as a lack of moral fibre. As a humanist I believe it is inherent”

This gobsmacked me.

It seems self evident to me that, even if humans do possess the ability to make moral decisions, we choose not to exercise it most of the time – which says very little of our inherent “moral fibre”.

Humanist interventions for social problems tend to revolve around harm-minimisation, education, and legal liberalisation. I do not deny there is a place for these things. However, the perspective from which they proceed is an incomplete one.

The dogmatic denial of the inherent corruptness of human nature can only lead to well-intentioned adjustment of social facade. If indeed the very human-ness of humanity is corrupt, this presents a much deeper problem to address when we see social brokenness.

supererogation and Jesus

I’ve just started reading Principles of Biomedical Ethics, by Beauchamp and Childress,  and have been introduced to the ethical concept of supererogation. A rough definition might be “exceeding one’s obligations”. [Be warned: it’s not a word to use in conversation.]

I’ve been reflecting on the place of supererogation in christian thinking. As our example is God Himself, and as we are called to “Be holy, as I am holy”, it seems that supererogation is irrelevant for the christian.

But then we think about Jesus’ words (Matt 5:47):

And if you greet only your brothers and sisters,^* what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same?

He’s clearly applying a supererogation-like idea here, but there is a difference.  Jesus invites his disciples to supererogate the common morality, using the comparison with the unspiritual to show the insufficiency of meeting an imagined minimum.

We are called to “Be holy, as I am holy”. This clearly precludes supererogation of the true moral standard, but mandates the supererogation of every other.

Elevating Discourse – AIDS and Abstinence

On the subject of useless arguments:

I am sick of hearing about the Pope and AIDS.

This came up on the previously-mentioned episode of Q&A I watched tonight. Again the discussion went approximately along the lines of:

Step 1: 98% of the group jeer at the remarks of the Pope

Step 2: Someone from the crowd stands up and gives a short speech criticising the Pope’s actions, to loud applause.

Step 3: A question is almost jokingly referred to a Catholic member of the panel (no Christian thinkers, just a pollie and a rogue priest), who makes a further joke to show they “get” it, and then offers half an answer, almost tongue in cheek itself.

All of this is clearly worse than useless, and extremely unenlightening.

I don’t want to talk about the Pope. I want to talk about AIDS. How do we fight it, and who is doing the fighting?

If the Catholic church refuses to participate in public education programs, that is their prerogative.

Why are we angry? Do we wish to use the Catholic infrastructure for public health education? If so, arguments convincing to Catholics need to be made. It’s not hard to see that pure utility isn’t going to work as an argument to an organisation with a clear moral mandate. Arguments which address Catholic sensibilities and reflect Catholic internal politics are needed if Rome is to be convinced.

Do we wish the Catholic church to stop encouraging abstinence? encourage away, but why is it our right to tell them what to teach? Since when have we developed a monopoly on truth? I agree that the scientific claims made by the Pope are clearly wrong, but when has the Catholic church been behelden to preach Science’s dogma?

Beyond all this- is the utilisation of Catholic infrastructure, or even the impact of contrary Catholic teaching on more mainstram public health education, worth spending so much time on in addressing the AIDS epidemic? I would guess not.

I think the real problem here is that we tend to  look for “bad guys”. If we can find people with power who believe differently to us about addressing the issue, solutions all of a sudden seem political. “If we could only stop the course of the disease!” becomes “If only those Catholics would get on board with our programs!”

Why don’t we accept that the Catholic church will take a different opinion to the broader public-health community, and leave it at that. Their mandate is the spiritual health of the people under their care. Like me, you may disagree with some or all of their teaching, but you cannot expect across-the-board subscription to some sort of humanist/rationalist approach to the world and its problems. 

However rational and humane it may seem.

Am I making sense? Please comment it up – I want to hear your thoughts on this.

ANB

Check out Erin’s excellent post. I watched Q&A tonight because a friend was on, and was overwhelmed with frustration at the lack of thoughtful and engaging debate.

The producers seemed to have invited cranks and politicos on in an attempt to “make good television”, which is not what such shows should be about. It was  a live forum, and with an articulate and interested audience and excellent live web integration.  

Every opportunity for interesting discussion was then squandered on obfuscatory political non-answers, low-quality humour, and the voicing of the kind of uninformed, sound-bitey arguments that are new to almost no-one.

We have a publicly-funded, tightly-regulated national broadcaster and still we cannot get a good issue-discussion program on television. The best at the moment is SBS’s Insight,  which itself suffers from lack of focus and the tendency to give polemics too much airtime.

The future is clearly with the bloggers. That is why Erin’s post is so important.

democratic guts

This is what guts looks like!

UPDATE: Seems Ezra Klein may be backing a different horse. It’s on.