Category: Religion

Global Orgasm Day

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Today is global orgasm day.  Why?  Well, why not?  But the organizers do have a larger goal: "To effect positive change in the energy field of the Earth through input of the largest possible surge of human energy, a synchronized Global Orgasm."

Lest you think this is purely prurient, do note that there is an interesting scientific component.   The Global Consciousness Project  is a peculiar project run out of Princeton University that has for many years been running experiments correlating random output devices with human consciousness.  Results from 12 years of experiments show small but highly statistically significant results.

Beginning in 1998 the group started to record data from "eggs" (non-deterministic random number generators) located around the world.  The data show or seem to show higher than random correlations with "global events" such as the funeral of Princess Diana (the events are designated in advance or before examining the data).  The eggs will record whether today’s global orgasm is associated with a perturbation in the global consciousness field.

Do I believe any of this?  No.  Will I participate in the experiment?  Anything for science.

Optimal presents

by  Tyler Cowen in

I grew up with agnotheistic Christmas traditions, but now I live under a Russian version of Hanukkah gift-giving conventions.  I prefer the latter because I get something every night, not to mention that I (usually) get it sooner.  Last night I got Civilization IV, and it was Sao Tome dark chocolate the night before that.  Getting five or ten things all at once doesn’t make me five times happier, so the new system is more neuro-efficient.  Plus, the gift card for Natasha is less likely to be lost under a big pile of stuff…

Bible fact of the day

by  Tyler Cowen in

Calculating how many Bibles are sold in the United States is a
virtually impossible task, but a conservative estimate is that in 2005
Americans purchased some twenty-five million Bibles–twice as many as
the most recent Harry Potter book.  The amount spent annually on Bibles
has been put at more than half a billion dollars.

That is from a fascinating article about the economics of Bible publishing.

Markets in everything, postal edition

by  Tyler Cowen in

Have cards sent to atheists after the Rapture.  "The Postal Service of the Saved," it works like this:

Just write your letter and it will be hand-delivered immediately
following the exodus of the pure from the Earth. But you must be
thinking to yourself, "How can the letters be delivered after the
Rapture?"  The answer is simple.  The creators of this site are Atheists.  That’s right, we don’t believe in God.  How else would we be able to deliver your correspondence after the Rapture? 

Why doesn’t God save everyone?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Even an agnotheist can care about this question.  It is simple:

The first prediction of the model is that God will not offer a salvation contract where everyone is saved.  If God sets θ=0 then all individuals receive s, but there would be no rearrangement of bundles and hence no utility benefits for God to balance the lump sum cost C.  This cannot be an equilibrium.  On the other hand setting θ=infinity would mean no individuals choose s, and no rearrangements, and this cannot be an equilibrium.  Thus θ will be set between these extremes, with the value depending on the forms of the divine and human utility functions and endowments.  Some, but not all individuals are predicted to choose salvation, and this is consistent with both the scriptures and observation.

Doesn’t this result fall apart if God can…um…perfectly "price discriminate" in his commands?  From Paul Oslington, here is more, namely a rational choice theory of God.  How about this bit:

Paradoxically, the more effective is the salvation mechanism the more it will turn the unsaved away from what God prefers.  Individuals choosing salvation will force up the prices of inputs into commodities God prefers be consumed, so that unsaved individuals will substitute away from commodities God values to those God frowns upon.

Who said pecuniary externalities do not matter? 

And here is John Derbyshire on God and religion, he is no longer a Christian.

If I were a Muslim, would I be a Shiite or a Sunni?

by  Tyler Cowen in

But now you all know my love of counterfactuals.  Vali Nasr writes:

…what separates Shiism from Sunnism is not so much the divergences in practice as the spirit in which Islam is interpreted.  First, whereas Sunnism took shape around belief in the writ of the majority and the legitimating power of communal consensus.  Shias do not put much stock in majority opinion in matters of religion.  Truth is vested not in the community of believers but in the virtuous leadership of the Prophet and the descendents.  Whereas Sunnis have always placed greatest emphasis on the Islamic message, Shias have also underscored the importance of the vehicle for that message.  Some have explained this difference by saying that Sunnis revere the Prophet because he relayed the Quran to Muslims, whereas Shias reverse the Quran because the Prophet relayed it [TC: to this non-specialist, this seems like an exaggeration of the difference on the Shiite side; here comes the qualifier though…].  Although most Shias stop short of holding such a view, there is no doubt that more extreme Shias have subscribed to it, and that Shiism places great emphasis on the prophetic function in tandem with the Islamic message.

That is from Vali Nasr’s The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will Shape the Future.  This is the most informative non-fiction book I have read in at least a month; I learned something — or at least thought I did — from every page. 

Addendum: Here is a good article on Islam and capitalism in Turkey.

Unholy Water

by  Alex Tabarrok in

The EclecticEconomist alerts us to a story in the Onion CBC News:

The United Church of Canada may ask its members to stop buying bottled water.

The
request is part of a resolution against the privatization of water
supplies that has been put before delegates at the church’s general
council this week in Thunder Bay….

"We’re against the commodification, the privatization is another way to say it, of water anyway, anywhere," [said a church leader.]

If the United Church cares about children they should reconsider their opposition.  Privatized water saves lives.  From my post, Water of Life:

…In the 1990s Argentina embarked
on one of the largest privatization campaigns in the world, including
the privatization of local water
companies covering approximately 30 percent of the country’s
municipalities.
Using the variation in ownership of water provision across time and
space generated
by the privatization process, we find that child mortality fell 8
percent in
the areas that privatized their water services and that the effect was
largest (26 percent) in the poorest areas….

That is the abstract to a very important paper, Water for Life: The Impact of the Privatization of Water Services on Child Mortality, by Sebastian Galiani, Paul Gertler and Ernesto Schargrodsky in the February 2005 issue of the JPE.  (free working paper version).

Markets in Everything: Child Brides

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Another sad one (from the NYT Magazine):

In Afghanistan, a child bride is very often just that: a child, even a preteen,
her innocence betrothed to someone older, even much, much older.  Rather than a willing union between a man and woman, marriage is frequently a
transaction among families, and the younger the bride, the higher the price she
may fetch.

The Nutty Professor

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Here’s an amazing piece of the life of Timothy Leary from the NYTimes book review of Timothy Leary: A Biography.

…he finally went to jail, and was likely to be kept there for years
before he would be considered for parole. Characteristically, he
compared himself to "Christ . . . harassed by Pilate and Herod." In a
twist that could have occurred only in 1970, a consortium of drug
dealers paid the Weather Underground to spring Leary from the
California Men’s Colony at San Luis Obispo – he pulled himself along a
telephone cable over the fence, then was picked up by a car – and
transport him to Algeria. He duly issued a press statement written in
the voice of the Weathermen, the money line of which was: "To shoot a
genocidal robot policeman in the defense of life is a sacred act."

But
when he and his wife, Rosemary, arrived in Algiers, they found
themselves wards of the exiled Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver,
who was probably smarter than Leary, possibly crazier, and had little
use for him. As Leary acknowledged, rather shrewdly: "It was a new
experience for me to be dependent on a strong, variable, sexually
restless, charismatic leader who was insanely erratic. I usually played
that role myself."

Against Transcendence

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Deirdre McCloskey gave the inaugural James M. Buchanan Lecture last week, The Hobbes Problem: From Machiavelli to Buchanan.  It was a good start to the series, eloquent, learned, and heartfelt.  McCloskey argued that the Hobbesian programme of building the polis on prudence alone, a program to which the moderns, Rawls, Buchanan, Gauthier and others have contributed is barren.  A good polis must be built upon all 7 virtues, both the pagan and transcendent, these being courage, justice, temperance, and prudence but also faith, hope and love (agape).

In the lecture, McCloskey elided the difficult problems of the transcendent virtues especially as they apply to politics (I expect a more complete analysis in the forthcoming book).  Faith, hope, and love sound pleasant in theory but in practice there is little agreement on how these virtues are instantiated.  It was love for their eternal souls that motivated the inquisitors to torture their victims.   President Bush wants to save Iran…with nuclear bombs.  Faith in the absurd is absurd.  Thanks but no thanks.

Since we can’t agree on the transcendent virtues injecting them into politics means intolerance and division.  Personally, I’d be happy to see the transcendent virtues fade away but I know that’s
unrealistic.  The next best thing, therefore, is to insist that the transcendent virtues be reserved for civil society and at all costs be kept out of politics.  The pagan virtues alone provide room for agreement in a cosmpolitan society, a society of the hetereogeneous. 

Of course, in all this I follow Voltaire:

Take a view of the Royal Exchange in London, a place more venerable
than many courts of justice, where the representatives of all nations
meet for the benefit of mankind. There the Jew, the Mahometan, and the
Christian transact together, as though they all professed the same
religion, and give the name of infidel to none but bankrupts. There
the Presbyterian confides in the Anabaptist, and the Churchman depends
on the Quaker’s word. At the breaking up of this pacific and free
assembly, some withdraw to the synagogue, and others to take a glass.
This man goes and is baptized in a great tub, in the name of the
Father, Son, and Holy Ghost: that man has his son’s foreskin cut off,
whilst a set of Hebrew words (quite unintelligible to him) are mumbled
over his child. Others retire to their churches, and there wait for the
inspiration of heaven with their hats on, and all are satisfied.

If one religion only were allowed in England, the Government would
very possibly become arbitrary; if there were but two, the people would
cut one another’s throats; but as there are such a multitude, they all
live happy and in peace.