Category: Religion
Why they hate Santa (the culture that is Scotland?)
The poster, which features a slightly demonic looking Father Christmas looming over a small boy, is part of the art student’s campaign to put an end to the commercialisation of Christmas and to launch an attack on the advertising industry’s targeting of children. “Santa gives more to rich kids than poor kids,” declares the poster, which will be on Glasgow’s Balmore Road.
“Santa Claus is a lie that teaches kids that products will make them happy. Before they’re old enough to think for themselves, the story of Santa has already got them hooked on consumerism. I think that’s more immoral than this billboard,” said Mr Cullen, who spent four years studying advertising before becoming disenchanted with the industry and switching to Glasgow School of Art’s environmental art course.
Here is more, and for the pointer I thank Jeremy Davis.
The first saintly economist?
ROME — Giuseppe Toniolo, a renowned late 19th and early 20th century lay Italian economist and political theorist, was beatified on Sunday in Rome’s Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls, the final step before a formal declaration of sainthood. Among other claims to fame, Toniolo is now the first economist ever beatified by the Catholic church.
Of course many of the early Church fathers, some of whom have become saints, also can be considered to have been economists. In any case, here is the story, and this piece sets him in the context of the German economists of the late 19th century.
For the pointer I thank Patrick Molloy. Here is my earlier blog post, Who are the Catholic Economists?
Sentences to ponder
*Bad Religion*
The author is Ross Douthat and the subtitle is How We Became a Nation of Heretics. It is a very good and very serious book arguing that America needs better religious thinking and practice, excerpt:
The entire media-entertainment complex, meanwhile, was almost shamelessly pro-Catholic. If a stranger to American life had only the movies, television, and popular journalism from which to draw inferences, he probably would have concluded that midcentury America was a Catholic-majority country — its military populated by the sturdy Irishmen of The Fighting 69th (1948) and The Fighting Sullivans (1944); its children educated and its orphans rescued by the heroic priests and nuns celebrated in Boys Town (1938), The Bells of Saint Mary’s (1945), and Fighting Father Dunne (1948); its civic life dominated by urban potentates like Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York and Denis Dougherty of Philadelphia; its everyday life infused with Catholic kitsch, from the 1950s hit single “Our Lady of Fatima” to the “win one for the Gipper” cult of Notre Dame football.
My main question is what could have become of most organized religion in an era of newly found television penetration — a competing source of ideas about right and wrong — and the birth control pill and sexual liberation of women? Not to mention gay rights. The recent evolution of American religion may not be optimal, but it is endogenous to some fairly fundamental forces. Non-religious thinking seems to offer especially high returns to successful people these days, and while American religion certainly has survived that impact (unlike in the UK?), what is left will seem quite alienating to much of the intelligentsia, Ross included.
For most mainstream religions, for most urban and suburban intellectuals circa 2012, it is hard to live a religiously observant life during the ages of say 17-25. American religion is left with late convert intellectuals and proponents of various enthusiasms, all filtered through the lens of America’s rural-tinged mass culture. Where is the indigenous and recent highbrow Christian culture of the United States?
Ross’s close comes off as voluntarist (“That quest begins with a single step…”), but in an economic model which change might nudge the United States back toward a more intellectual Christianity? Your suggestions are welcome.
The Grand Gameshow
Chris Brunk, an all-too-loyal MR reader, writes to me:
I developed a thought experiment that I wanted to share with you. I call it “The Grand Gameshow”.
In this thought experiment you are a contestant on a gameshow. The host of the gameshow (let’s call him Alex) has a notecard that says whether or not god exists and to what extent he is involved in the affairs of mankind. You start with $1,000,000 that you must allocate across five possible categories:
- Category 1 – Scriptural literalism. Bet into this category if you believe that one of the religious texts is precisely accurate.
- Category 2 – God is omnipresent. Bet into this category if you believe that god is everywhere and intimately involved in our lives.
- Category 3 – God as a guide. Bet into this category if you believe that god is only there for the major turning points in life and/or when we reach out in prayer.
- Category 4 – God as a watchmaker. Bet into this category if you believe that god set the universe in motion but is no longer around.
- Category 5 – Atheism. Bet into this category if you believe that god does not exist.
You can distribute the money however you like (e.g. all $1,000,000 in one category or $200,000 in each). After you’ve allocated your $1,000,000 Alex flips over the notecard and reveals which of the five categories is correct. You keep any money that you’ve allocated into the correct category.
Some footnotes. For the purposes of playing this gameshow assume that your financial situation is that of a farmhand in Mexico. You earn about $4,000 per year and have no substantial savings or degrees. I classify simulism as being category 4.
I would be very interested to hear how you’d allocate your funds versus say, Russ Roberts or Robin Hanson.
How about this?: the true “solution” to the universe would be to our minds incredibly complex, although within the theoretical framework of a (non-existent) omniscient being it would be simple. If we had more knowledge about the true theory, however, though without reaching omniscience, many of us would not agree as to whether it involved a God or not. The knowledge-enhanced me would think it did not. The books don’t enter into it, nor do the book trucks, sadly.
For Russ or Robin I would not pretend to speak. Robin has papers and blog posts on simulism, so at the very least he is interested in that topic but I will leave it to him to describe his stance.
Will Arab Spring lead to democracy?
A new BPEA paper by Eric Chaney (pdf) suggests maybe not:
Will the Arab Spring lead to long-lasting democratic change? To explore this question I examine the determinants of the Arab world’s democratic defi cit in 2010. I find that the percent of a country’s landmass that was conquered by Arab armies following the death of the prophet Muhammad statistically accounts for this defi cit. Using history as a guide, I hypothesize that this pattern reflects the long-run influence of control structures developed under Islamic empires in the pre-modern era and and that the available evidence is consistent with this interpretation. I also investigate the determinants of the recent uprisings. When taken in unison, the results cast doubt on claims that the Arab-Israeli conflict or Arab/Muslim culture are systematic obstacles to democratic change in the region and point instead to the legacy of the region’s historical institutional framework.
Here is a good sentence:
…the fact that the Arab world’s democratic defi cit is shared by 10 non-Arab countries that were conquered by Arab armies casts doubt on the importance of the role of Arab culture in perpetuating the democratic defi cit.
And this:
Once one accounts for the 28 countries conquered by Arab armies, the evolution of democracy in the remaining 15
Muslim-majority countries since 1960 largely mirrors that of the rest of the developing world.
How to raise your child, or yourself, an atheist
That is a discussion from Justin L. Barrett’s new and interesting Born Believers: The Science of Children’s Religious Belief. He gives more than equal time to how to raise your child to be religious, but we’re already pretty good at that. Here are his atheism tips, noting that I am excerpting and paraphrasing:
1. Have less-than-average fluency in reasoning about minds.
2. Do not have children.
3. Stay safe.
4. Get in the habit of crediting or blaming humans for whatever you can.
5. Learn to like pseudoagents (including abstractions).
6. Take time to reflect.
7. Add to these factors indoctrination of the young against religion.
The key theme of Barrett’s book is HADD — Hypersensitive Agency Detection Device, and how pronounced it is in most human beings.
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.
You might be irrational if…
Philosopher Michael Huemer on political irrationality and how to combat it:
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?
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.