Category: Religion

For some non-obvious reason I thought of Bryan Caplan when I was reading this article:

As a toddler, he was put on a throne and worshipped as by monks who treated him like a god. But the boy chosen by the Dalai Lama as a reincarnation of a spiritual leader has caused consternation – and some embarrassment – for Tibetan Buddhists by turning his back on the order that had such high hopes for him.

Instead of leading a monastic life, Osel Hita Torres now sports baggy trousers and long hair, and is more likely to quote Jimi Hendrix than Buddha.

Yesterday he bemoaned the misery of a youth deprived of television, football and girls. Movies were also forbidden – except for a sanctioned screening of The Golden Child starring Eddie Murphy, about a kidnapped child lama with magical powers. "I never felt like that boy," he said.

The story is here.  Successive photos are here.  And:

At six, he was allowed to socialise only with other reincarnated souls – though for a time he said he lived next to the actor Richard Gere's cabin.

He is still revered by the Buddhist community although here is a bit more on the embarrassed responses.  I wonder how many gurus come to such realizations but do not speak up.  Does living in Spain have an effect?

This is an example to inspire Jeffrey Williams:

If only our capital markets could run so smoothly:

I thank Michael Webster for the pointer.

Deron Bauman reports to me:

Information Age Prayer is
a site that charges you a monthly fee to say prayers for you. A typical
charge is $4.95 per month to say three prayers specified by you each
day.

"We use state of the art text to speech synthesizers to voice each
prayer at a volume and speed equivalent to typical person praying," the
company states. "Each prayer is voiced individually, with the name of
the subscriber displayed on screen.

"Prices, however, are dictated by the length of the prayer. As noted
in the Information Age Prayer FAQ, "A discounted prayer will cost less
than other prayers of similar length."

Here is the full story.

Or is it just intertemporal substitution?:

Two years after having one of the lowest birth rates in the
world, Georgia [the country] is enjoying something of a baby boom, following an
intervention from the country's most senior cleric.

At
the end of 2007, in a move to reverse the Caucasian country's dwindling
birth figures, the head of the Georgian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Ilia
II, came up with an incentive. He promised to personally baptise any
baby born to parents of more than two children.

There was only one catch: the baby had to be born after the initiative was launched.

The results are, in the words of the Georgian Orthodox Church, "a miracle".

…The country's birth rate increased by nearly 20% during 2008 – a rate four times faster than the previous year.

Many parents say they took the decision to have another child on the basis of the Patriarch's incentive.

Here is the full article and I thank John Chilton for the pointer.

The subtitle is Forty Tales From the Afterlives.  This bestseller looks thin and unsubstantial but I would recommend it to some of you.

Take a Baylor neuroscientist, feed him a steady dose of Robin Hanson, and then let him write down forty short, conceptual scenarios for what life after death might be like.  Not for everyone, but I found the "pleasure per minute" ratio to be worthwhile.

I sometimes jest with Robin Hanson that he is a Christian theologian, studying eschatology.  In my dialogue with Peter Singer I described his thought in terms of a longstanding Jewish tradition of commentary on the idea of suffering, a successor to Spinoza you might say.  In Law and Literature class I often ask my students: "What is the author's implicit theology?"

Now Kevin Vallier sends me this very interesting piece on Rawls:

When John Rawls died in 2002, there was found among his files a short statement entitled “On My Religion”, apparently written in the 1990s. In this text Rawls describes the history of his religious beliefs and attitudes towards religion. He refers to a period during his last two years as an undergraduate at Princeton (1941–2) when he “became deeply concerned with theology and its doctrines”, and considered attending a seminary to study for the Episcopal priesthood. But he decided to enlist in the army instead, “as so many of my friends and classmates were doing”. By June of 1945, he had abandoned his orthodox Christian beliefs. With characteristic tentativeness and a disclaimer of self-knowledge, Rawls speculates that his beliefs changed because of his experiences in the war and his reflections on the moral significance of the Holocaust. When he returned to Princeton in 1946, it was to pursue a doctorate in philosophy.

The article, by Joshua Cohen and Thomas Nagel, has much more of interest. It's one of the best mid-length essays I've read in some time.

Matt S. points me to the following:

Matthew and Michelle Reed, along with their
2-year-old son and newborn baby boy, are the first of what could be a
stream of people to move to Dothan [Alabama] under a program that offers Jewish
families as much as $50,000 to relocate and get involved with the
city's only synagogue, Temple Emanu-El.

A
family that's been part of the reform congregation for decades funded
the $1 million resettlement program and launched it last year, fearing
the congregation would dwindle and die without an infusion of new blood.