Category: Religion

Christian card counters

Until last year, he and his high school friend from Bible camp, Ben Crawford, ran a group of more than 30 religious card counters. Based in Seattle, the rotating cast of players says it won $3.2 million over five years — all while regularly attending church, leading youth groups and studying theology.

But first Jones and his group had to wrestle with the apparent moral paradox: Should Christians be counting cards?

“My father-in-law flipped out about it,” Jones said. “I remember Ben and I discussing everything. Are we being dishonest to the casinos? Is money an evil thing?”

Group members believed what they were doing was consistent with their faith because they felt they were taking money away from an evil enterprise. Further, they did not believe that counting cards was inherently a bad thing; rather, it was merely using math skills in a game of chance. They treated their winnings as income from a job and used it for all manner of expenses.

The article is here, hat tip goes to Mo Costandi.

The price elasticity of contraception

Let’s try throwing out some data on this topic:

This paper uses a unique natural experiment to investigate the sensitivity of American college women’s contraceptive choice to the price of oral birth control and the importance of its use on educational and health outcomes. With the passage of the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005, Congress inadvertently and unexpectedly increased the effective price of birth control pills (“the Pill”) at college health centers more than three-fold, from $5 to $10 a month to between $30 and $50 a month. Using quasi-difference-in-difference and fixed effects methodologies and an intention-to-treat (ITT) design with two different data sets, we find that this policy change reduced use of the Pill by at least 1 to 1.8 percentage points, or 2 to 4 percent, among college women, on average. For college women who lacked health insurance or carried large credit card balances, the decline was two to three times as large. Women who lack insurance and have sex infrequently appear to substitute toward emergency contraception; uninsured women who are frequent sex participants appear to substitute toward non-prescription forms of birth control. Additionally, we find small but significant decreases in frequency of intercourse and the number of sex partners, suggesting that some women may be substituting away from sexual behavior in general.

That is from Brad Hershbein (pdf).  This paper (pdf) covers Bangladesh.  I am not interested in providing any accompanying moral lesson, one way or the other.

Dostoyevsky

Ken writes:

I was scouring your blog for Fyodor Dostoevsky and was surprised to see no mentions. I was just wondering your thoughts on him. Currently reading the Brothers Karamazov and it’s fantastic.

Brothers Karamazov spent seven or so years as my favorite book, starting in high school.  I’m not suggesting it is juvenile, only that I find it hard to go back and enjoy things at lower levels than I did before (I also don’t like to eat in still-good but declining restaurants).  I no longer find Notes from Underground interesting, as I regard its questions as a dead end.  I’d sooner reread Pascal.  I never got through The Idiot or Demons in the first place.  About two years ago I read House of the Dead and liked it, though it felt like a respite from the more typical conception of Dostoyevsky.

How much can you like Dostoyevsky anyway?  My sense is that he is probably underrated as a pure writer (much of it comes across as garbage in English translation, but perhaps is quite biting or comic or interestingly manic), and overrated as a source of the “novel of ideas.”

If you enter “Dostoyevsky” into the search function of Twitter, you don’t come up with much interesting these days.

What will be Europe’s next major religion?

Probably not this:

The Church of Kopimism, whose principal tenent is the right to file-share, has been formally recognized as a religious organization in Sweden.

The Swedish government agency Kammarkollegiet registered the Church of Kopimism as a religious organization in late December, just before Christmas, the group said in a Wednesday statement. Members of the church applied three times in their more than year-long quest to have the religion formally recognized in Sweden.

Sweden is now the first and only country to recognize Kopimism as a religion, the group said.

“For the Church of Kopimism, information is holy and copying is a sacrament,” it said in a statement.

Christianity remains the leading contender.  In the meantime, file under “The Culture that is Sweden.”  I thank Eric H. for the pointer.

Addendum: And here is Matt Yglesias on Europe as Conservative.  I agree with the points he makes, but that Europe is not very Christian, and that America tries to do more to raise the status of Christianity and Christians, deserves further discussion.

Markets in everything (and proud ye shall be)

Interesting throughout, but let’s cut to the chase:

Advertising our altar bread is a positive thing for Cavanagh Company. We take a lot of pride in putting our family name on a product that will eventually become the body and blood of Jesus.

You can file that under “Very good paragraphs.”  How about this one?:

Had production remained the exclusive bailiwick of monastic communities, it is likely that the findings of Vatican II would have prompted some minor changes in Communion-wafer production. Among the guidelines issued by the Church was a directive to “make the bread look more breadlike,” head of production Dan Cavanagh told me. It is a change whose significance may yet be lost on the millions of churchgoers who continue to think of hosts as a form of Styrofoam. Nevertheless, Cavanagh’s more “breadlike” whole-wheat wafer caught on. It became the industry standard, and forced the Poor Clare nuns to follow suit.

Some of it is better than satire:

…the company maintains a fully-automated production process where employees are forbidden from laying their hands on the wafers. “I feel pretty strongly that the host should not be touched,” Dan said. His view makes it easier to comply with legal guidelines for industrial food production, but it also gives the company something to market. “Our wafers are untouched by human hands,” boasts one promotional brochure. “That gets my dander up,” a Sister in Clyde told the Chicago Tribune: The Sisters’ touch gives what other businesses would call “added value.”

And what if you have coelic disease?  Every paragraph in this story is fascinating.  I thank Paul Hsieh for the pointer.

What would Grossman and Hart say?

After a lengthy legal battle between a black South Carolina church and members of the Ku Klux Klan, a judge has ruled that the church owns a building where KKK robes and T-shirts are sold.

A circuit judge ruled last month that New Beginnings Baptist Church is the rightful owner of the building that houses the Redneck Shop, which operates a so-called Klan museum and sells Klan robes and T-shirts emblazoned with racial slurs.

That is near Columbia, and the story is here.  It is temporary, yes, but does this count as vertical or horizontal integration?

The culture that is Norway?

The UK’s 2011 bestseller lists might have been dominated by cookery, courtesy of Jamie Oliver, and romance, courtesy of David Nicholls, but Norwegian readers were plumping for another sort of book last year: the Bible.

The first Norwegian translation of the Bible for 30 years topped the country’s book charts almost every week between its publication in October and the end of the year, selling almost 80,000 copies so far and hugely exceeding expectations. Its launch in the autumn saw Harry Potter-style overnight queues, with bookshops selling out on the first day as Norwegians rushed to get their hands on the new edition.

I’ve been wondering what the new religion of Europe (is Norway Europe?) is going to be.  The article is here.

The culture that is Germany, kein eurobond für den Papst

A GERMAN citizen has filed a complaint against Pope Benedict XVI for not using a seat belt in the Popemobile during his September visit to his homeland.

Lawyer Johannes Christian Sundermann has filed papers in Dortmund on behalf of his unnamed client, charging the Pope with “repeated breaches” of Germany’s seat belt law.

“Herr Joseph Ratzinger, born 16 April 1927 in Marktl/Altötting” travelled on September 24th and 25th “for the duration of more than an hour” without a seat belt, the lawyer states in documents.

Mr Sundermann and his client say they can prove the repeated misdemeanour during his visit to Freiburg – using videos from YouTube.

Here is more.

Gratitude

PsycNet: The effect of a grateful outlook on psychological and physical well-being was examined. In Studies 1 and 2, participants were randomly assigned to 1 of 3 experimental conditions (hassles, gratitude listing, and either neutral life events or social comparison); they then kept weekly (Study 1) or daily (Study 2) records of their moods, coping behaviors, health behaviors, physical symptoms, and overall life appraisals. In a 3rd study, persons with neuromuscular disease were randomly assigned to either the gratitude condition or to a control condition. The gratitude-outlook groups exhibited heightened well-being across several, though not all, of the outcome measures across the 3 studies, relative to the comparison groups. The effect on positive affect appeared to be the most robust finding. Results suggest that a conscious focus on blessings may have emotional and interpersonal benefits.

Western Australian de gustibus, on multiple fronts

Mr. Dinnison, who has mined copper, tin, nickel and gold, drills holes that are then packed with explosives to extract ore. He wears a $5,000 gold chain crucifix. “I’m not religious, but I am conscious that what I do is serious,” he said. “But then you come home and you have all that cash.”

Despite having earned roughly US$1 million since he started, he has no savings and doesn’t apologize. “The mines are so dull, that when you get back here, everything is stimulation and excitement,” he said. “The money I spend supports other businesses because of the [stuff] I blow it on.”

There is more of interest here.

Not From the Onion: The Christmas Tree War

Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty. Click image to expand.
From Slate

The war between artificial and natural Christmas trees has been going on for years and the artificial trees are winning. The National Christmas Tree Association, the association of natural trees, has been trying to fight back with “information” campaigns like What You Might Not Know About Fake Christmas Trees. Some samples: they are made in China, by exploited workers, with lead!  And my favorite:

…fake trees were invented by a company who made toilet bowl brushes…regardless of how far the technology has come, it’s still interesting to know the first fake Christmas trees were really just big green toilet bowl brushes.

The National Christmas Tree Association, however, has a problem. Christmas trees are produced in a competitive industry with many small firms so there’s no big firm willing to bear the costs of a national ad campaign. (The artificial tree lobby group, The American Christmas Tree Association has a noticeably more professional website and a better name.)  Thus, following the lead of milk, cotton and California raisin producers, the natural Christmas tree industry lobbied the Dept. of Agriculture to create the Christmas Tree Promotion Board. The DOA agreed and authorized the board to create a “program of promotion, research, evaluation, and information designed to strengthen the Christmas tree industry’s position in the marketplace,” to be financed by a tax on Christmas tree producers (=>500 sales) of 15 cents per tree.

The Christmas tree tax outraged conservatives such as David Addington, formerly Cheney’s chief of staff and once called “the most powerful man you’ve never heard of.” Addington argued:

The economy is barely growing and nine percent of the American people have no jobs.  Is a new tax on Christmas trees the best President Obama can do?

Not surprisingly other conservatives labeled this a Grinch tax and a tax on Christmas. Other people (liberals?) attacked the tax as promoting Christianity which I find strange since I always thought of the Christmas tree as a pagan symbol. Oh well.

Finally, the Obama administration put the program on hold. (Amateurs – don’t they know taxes are raised after elections not before?). So there you have it, American politics in a nutshell.

Hat tip: Joshua Hedlund.

Addendum: Here is Rush, The Trees, just because.