Category: Religion
Can you raise your kid as a conservative or liberal?
Here is a new study (caveat emptor all the way):
This new study, by a team led by psychologist R. Chris Fraley of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, begins with new mothers describing their intentions and approach in 1991, and ends with a survey of their children 18 years later. In between, it features an assessment of the child’s temperament at age 4.
…“Parents who endorsed more authoritarian parenting attitudes when their children were one month old were more likely to have children who were conservative in their ideologies at age 18,” the researchers report. “Parents who endorsed more egalitarian parenting attitudes were more likely to have children who were liberal.”
Obviously genes are an alternative channel of influence. And this is a stunner:
Also, the Illinois researchers did not gauge the parents’ political beliefs.
So I don’t believe the interpretations at all. Still, it is interesting to see the extent of attitudinal persistence, and furthermore “…our results also showed that early childhood temperament predicted variation in conservative versus liberal ideologies.” I suspect, however, that politics would turn out to be less susceptible to parental shaping than, say, religion or general temperamental approach to religion.
I consider this study radically incomplete, but still it is interesting to see the question tackled with a twenty-year time window and some ex ante planning.
For the pointer I thank www.artsjournal.com.
Where oh where are they?
Bringing the search for another Earth about as close as it will ever get, a team of European astronomers was scheduled to announce on Wednesday that it had found a planet the same mass as Earth’s in Alpha Centauri, a triple star system that is the Sun’s closest neighbor, only 4.4 light-years away.
Here is more. Planets, planets everywhere…
Emails I receive (the consumer surplus of the internet)
…the origins of your name, off by a letter.
RL
> Put the following text into google: freemason Cowan Tyler What is the result?
Interesting. “Tyler” is the title of an officer in the Masonic hierarchy, while a “cowan” is a stonemason who is not a member of the Freemasons guild. This from “Freemasonry for Dummies”:
The Tyler’s job is to keep off all “cowans and eavesdroppers” (for more on the Tyler, see Chapter 5). The term cowan is unusual and its origin is probably from a very old Anglo-Saxon word meaning “dog.” Cowan came to be a Scottish word used as a putdown to describe stonemasons who did not join the Freemasons guild, while the English used it to describe Masons who built rough stone walls without mortar and did not know the true secrets of Freemasonry.
A cultural guide for Afghanis
After eleven years, we are trying a new approach:
“Please do not get offended if you see a NATO member blowing his/her nose in front of you,” the guide instructs.
“When Coalition members get excited, they may show their excitement by patting one another on the back or the behind,” it explains. “They may even do this to you if they are proud of the job you’ve done. Once again, they don’t mean to offend you.”
This is news to me, though I would like to see it confirmed:
Fifty-one coalition troops have been killed this year by their Afghan counterparts. While some insider attacks have been attributed to Taliban infiltrators, military officials say the majority stem from personal disputes and misunderstandings.
Finally:
NATO’s coalition is described as a “work of art.”
For my house, I might rather have a Suzani.
Catholic markets in everything not all magazines are folding
With exorcism booming in Poland, Roman Catholic priests have joined forces with a publisher to launch what they claim is the world’s first monthly magazine focused exclusively on chasing out the devil.
“The rise in the number or exorcists from four to more than 120 over the course of 15 years in Poland is telling,” Father Aleksander Posacki, a professor of philosophy, theology and leading demonologist and exorcist told reporters in Warsaw at the Monday launch of the Egzorcysta monthly.
Ironically, he attributed the rise in demonic possessions in what remains one of Europe’s most devoutly Catholic nations partly to the switch from atheist communism to free market capitalism in 1989.
“It’s indirectly due to changes in the system: capitalism creates more opportunities to do business in the area of occultism. Fortune telling has even been categorised as employment for taxation,” Posacki told AFP.
Economists who are clergy
Your post on economist/artists got me thinking about economists/clergy.Obviously the most famous is Reverend Malthus. A Google search for “Economist Catholic priest” didn’t turn up much. “Economist rabbi” discloses that Israel Kirzner is the rabbi of a congregation in Brooklyn. “Economist clergyman” turned up Richard Jones but I’ve never heard of him. Economist/Jesuit turned up a number of names, all of them obscure to me.
My favored explanation is that “clergy” is an artificially higher bar than “artist”. Probably a large number of economists are and were devout people with learned and creative views on religion without having been ordained. E.g. Karl Homann is a first-rate theologian but not a priest. Robert Aumann is a first-rate Talmud scholar but not a rabbi. If the bar for “clergy” were parallel to that for “artist” these fellows would certainly make it.
Who else comes to mind? The School of Salamanca, and going back many medieval theologians wrote on economic issues. Paul Heyne. Heinrich Pesch. Galiani was an Abbey. Philip Wicksteed was a Unitarian theologian. The still underrated Richard Whately was the Archbishop of Dublin. Bishop George Berkeley wrote on monetary theory, as did Reverend Jonathan Swift.
The 18th century clergyman John Witherspoon wrote on monetary economics. Thomas Chalmers, who wrote on the Poor Laws and theories of underconsumption in the early 19th century, was ordained in the Church of Scotland.
Did all these 19th century figures really want to be economists, really want to be clergy, or both?
I thank Maria Pia Paganelli for a useful discussion of this point.
There is no great stagnation (remote-controlled cockroach edition)
Built-in power supply? Check. Ability to survive anything? Check. Easy to control? Okay, anyone who’s had a cockroach as an uninvited houseguest knows that’s not the case. So, rather than re-inventing the biological wheel with a robotic version, North Carolina State university researchers have figured out a way to remotely control a real Madagascar hissing cockroach. They used an off-the-shelf microcontroller to tap in to the roach’s antennae and abdomen, then sent commands that fooled the insect into thinking danger was near, or that an object was blocking it. That let the scientists wirelessly prod the insect into action, then guide it precisely along a curved path, as shown in the video below the break. The addition of a sensor could allow the insects to one day perform tasks, liking searching for trapped disaster victims — something to think about the next time you put a shoe to one.
What’s it like trying to climb the IQ gradient with this device? There are videos at the link, and for the pointer I thank magilson.
The next transformational technology?
Noah Smith writes:
Addendum: I seem to be the only person talking about Desire Modification as a transformational technology. Greg Egan and Vernor Vinge have written books in which this technology plays a central role. In my “spare time” I’m writing a couple of sci-fi short stories based on the idea. It’s a really big deal, and I’ll write a post about it soon.
The new Thomas Nagel book
The title is *Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False*. Here is a brief summary of his “teleological” argument. My bottom lines on it:
1. He is good on attacking the hidden hypocrisies of many reductionists, secularists, and those who wish to have it both ways on religious modes of thinking.
2. He fully recognizes the absurdities (my word, not his) of dualism, and thinks them through carefully and honestly. Bryan Caplan should beware.
3. The most typical sentence I found in the book was: “We can continue to hope for a transcendent self-understanding that is neither theistic nor reductionist.”
4. He doesn’t take seriously enough the view: “The Nagel theory of mind is simply wrong.”
5. People will dismiss his arguments to remain in their comfort zone, while temporarily forgetting he is smarter than they are and furthermore that many of their views do not make sense or cohere internally.
6. It is ultimately a book about how Christian many of us still are, and how closely the egocentric illusion is connected to a broadly religious worldview. I don’t think he would see it that way.
For the pointer to the book — now out early on Kindle — I thank David Gordon.
Euro auction markets in everything (a good start)
…an entire Tuscan village has gone up for sale on eBay.
Nestled among oaks at 850 metres altitude and blessed with stunning views over the Casentino valley, the medieval village of Pratariccia has stood empty for 50 years, ever since its population of farmers and shepherds abandoned their stone cottages for factory jobs during Italy‘s economic boom.
Now the owners of the remote village – reportedly a religious order – are seeking to cash in with an online sale.
“They tried and failed to sell the village through agencies for years but have got a lot of attention by putting Pratariccia on eBay and should get a result,” said Luca Santini, mayor of nearby Stia, who walked in the woods around the village as a child picking mushrooms.
There is more information here, hat tip goes to @grahamfarmelow.
Sentences to ponder
At Cardiff University, students found it easier to pretend to be gay than Christian.
Here is more, from Evan Selinger, interesting throughout.
Is Jesus cheaper than a buffalo? (ZMP gods)
At upwards of US$500, the cost of slaughtering a buffalo to revive a relative condemned to ill-health by the spirits has pushed the Jarai indigenous minority residents of Somkul village in Ratanakkiri to a more affordable religious option: Christianity.
In the village in O’Yadav district’s Som Thom commune, about 80 per cent of the community have given up on spirits and ghosts in favour of Sunday sermons and modern medicine.
Sev Chel, 38, said she made the switch because when she used to get sick, it could cost her hundreds of dollars to appease the gods with a sacrificial package that might include a cow or buffalo, a chicken, bananas, incense and rice wine.
“So if I sold that buffalo and took the money to pay for medicine, it is about 30,000 riel to 40,000 riel [for them to] get better, so we are strong believers in Jesus,” she said. “If I did not believe in Jesus, maybe at this time I would still be poor and not know anything besides my community.”
A small wooden church has emerged in Somkul commune where the word of Jesus Christ, or “Yesu Yang” to the Jarai, is preached instead of the mixture of animism and Theravada Buddhism they have traditionally followed.
Kralan Don, 60, said he and the four other members of his family began attending the church about five years ago because of their poor standard of living.
“We believe in Christianity because we are poor; we don’t have money to buy buffaloes, chickens and pigs to pray for the spirits of the god of land or the god of water when those gods make us get sick,” he said.
Klan Ly, 56, said she had completely abandoned her fears of black magic after making the conversion.
For the pointer I thank WK.
*The Great Divide: Nature and Human Nature in the Old World and the New*
That is the new book by the very active and very smart Peter Watson, due out soon but I bought a copy in the UK.
Why has the New World been so different from the Old World? What a splendid seventeenth and eighteenth century question. Imagine Jared Diamond — and with comparable scope — yet with shamans, peyote, and El Niño playing a role in the argument. I recommend it to everyone who can keep in mind how speculative the argument will be.
If we had to sum up what has gone before and describe in a few words the main features shaping early life in the Old World, those words would be: the weakening monsoon, cereals (grain), domesticated mammals and pastoralism, the plough and the traction complex, riding, megaliths, milk, alcohol. One way to highlight the differences between the two worlds is to perform the same summing-up exercise for the Americas…For the New World the crucial and equivalent words would be: El Niño, volcanoes, earthquakes, maize (corn), the potato, hallucinogens, tobacco, chocolate, rubber, the jaguar, and the bison.
Unlike Diamond, this book assigns ideology a central role in the story. Europe and the Middle East generate the ideas of the shepherd, the New World the ideas of the shaman, some of which may have been picked up or carried from the Chukchi of Siberia. Perhaps my favorite point in the book is the observation that the Old World had a greater diversity of ideologies.
Watson touches on many Hansonian themes about the differences between gatherers and foragers. Here is a Guardian review. Here is an Independent review. Here is a Matthew Price review.
This is an easy book to criticize, see the reviews or for instance take this passage:
…artwork was not developed [in the early stages of the New World] because there was no need to establish either dedicated territories or tribal identities. And/or food was in such plentiful supply that they had no need to keep records that assisted their memory of animal habits.
One really does have to take this book as a scenario, not as science. It is nonetheless interesting if used with care.
A new age of religious “austerity”
In an announcement posted Feb. 15 on the government’s website, Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti said he would seek legislation requiring the church to pay taxes on all its commercial holdings. About one-third of the 100,000 properties owned by the church in Italy are used for commercial ventures, according to Italy’s Radical Party, which has long campaigned against the tax exemption.
Here is more, and for the pointer I thank Mark Thorson.
*Peter Singer and Christian Ethics*
The author is Charles C. Camosy and the subtitle is Beyond Polarization, you can buy it here.
Most philosophies draw heavily from religion, as Ross Douthat suggested recently. Peter Singer is no exception, as Camosy ably demonstrates. There should be more books like this.
My new question for visitors to the lunch table is: “What is it you really believe in?”