Iconoclast

Dictionary.com's word of the day is

iconoclast \ahy-KON-uh-klast\, noun: a person who attacks cherished beliefs or institutions as foolish or wrong
    By 1596, from French iconoclaste, from Middle Latin iconoclastes, from Late Greek eikonoklastes, from eikon "image" + klastes "breaker," from klan "to break." Originally the word referred to those in the Eastern Church in 8th and 9th centuries whose mobs of followers destroyed icons and other religious objects on the grounds that they were idols. Extended sense of "one who attacks orthodox beliefs or institutions" is first attested 1842.

While some who avoid this website probably do so because they perceive Moristotle to be an iconoclast, he doesn't think the term applies. At least not in the sense of attacking cherished beliefs simply because they are cherished. If he seems to attack religion and belief in god, it is because he sees through a glass clearly that there is no god and religion is a delusion¹.
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1. As Robert M. Pirsig said in Lila (not Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance), "When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion, it is called religion."

Moristotle's 66th-birthday pie

My wife created this wonder using as the base recipe Epicurious's recipe for "Harvest Tart." She modified the fruit by adding some that was fresh, and she added some Grand Marnier to make the pie less dry than last year's was. This might not have been necessary, for last year's pie contained only dried fruit. But I'm sure the Grand Marnier made the pie all the more delightful.

Click on the picture to get a closer view of the filling.

Standing in the rain arguing

The evolution-creation question is settled. Man evolved and was not created. To argue the question with a creationist would be like standing in a driving rain and letting him try to convince you that it wasn't raining. Or vice versa. No mileage there. Forget it.

Same thing as regards arguing with jehovahs, evangelical Christians, Islamists, or other fantasists whether heaven exists or some other superstition is true. Especially Muslims with dynamite strapped around their torsos.

Putting that out there for you is my gift to myself and to you for my birthday today. Happy my birthday to you too.

Later the same day

Shortly after publishing those paragraphs, a birthday card arrived from one of my sisters. She appealed to me to read the Billy Graham clips she'd enclosed. There are three of them, apparently from a Q&A column of Dr. Graham's titled "On Christianity."

Question 1:

DEAR REV. GRAHAM: Do you think Christ will come again and the world will end in 2009? I get very discouraged when I see the way the world is going—the economic situation, terrorism, crime, warfare, etc.—and I wonder how much longer God is going to let this continue.

Do you get even more discouraged when you realize that there is no heaven and your body isn't going to be restored to its young sexiness?

Question 2:

DEAR REV. GRAHAM: My friend (who doesn't believe in God or religion) tells me that if I really believe the Bible, then why don't I follow all the laws in the Old Testament? I do believe the Bible is God's Word, but am I doing something wrong by not following these laws?

No, dear, and neither would the ancient Israelites have been wrong to ignore them, except that the religious elders would have banished them from the community.

Question 3:

DEAR REV. GRAHAM: If God is real, then why are there so many religions in the world? They can't all be right, can they?

They sure can't all be right, now, can they? Lots of people (who still want to believe in heaven) think that it almost doesn't matter what you believe. In Charles M. Blow's December 27 op-ed piece in The New York Times ("Heaven for the Godless?"), he reports on the June publication of

the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life['s] controversial survey in which 70 percent of Americans said that they believed religions other than theirs could lead to eternal life.
    This threw evangelicals into a tizzy. After all, the Bible makes it clear that heaven is a velvet-roped V.I.P. area reserved for Christians. Jesus said so: "I am the way, the truth and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me." But the survey suggested that Americans just weren't buying that....
    And they didn't stop there. Nearly half also thought that atheists could go to heaven—dragged there kicking and screaming, no doubt—and most thought that people with no religious faith also could go.

I hope that puts my sister's mind at ease.

Have a light Ten Days of Newton

In her Wild Side column yesterday in The New York Times, evolutionary biologist Olivia Judson pointed out that:

Sir Isaac Newton, the founder of modern physics and mathematics, and arguably the greatest scientist of all time, was born on Christmas Day.
    ...Newton was born in England on Christmas Day 1642 according to the Julian calendar...But by the 1640s, much of the rest of Europe was using the Gregorian calendar (the one in general use today); according to this calendar, Newton was born on Jan. 4, 1643.

Ms. Judson suggests that an alternative reason for our annual winter holiday could be to have an extended festival in honor of Newton.

After all, the festival of Christmas properly continues for a further 12 days, until the feast of the Epiphany on Jan. 6. So the festival of Newton could begin on Christmas Day and then continue for an extra 10 days, representing the interval between the calendars.

For an explanation of why the Julian calendar was supplanted, plus a summary of Newton's career (including his interest in religion and alchemy), I recommend Ms. Judson's column.

She even suggests a song in honor of Newton’s Birthday festival. The final verse begins:

On the tenth day of Newton,
My true love gave to me...

For another article on Newton, you might consult Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia.

Robin Williams on American politics

If you have nine minutes...

http://politicalirony.com/2008/11/30/robin-williams-on-obamas-election/

The real Bill Ayers

In the recently concluded presidential race, I was unwillingly thrust upon the stage and asked to play a role in a profoundly dishonest drama. I refused, and here’s why.

So begins William Ayers’s first public statement about John McCain's attempt to defeat Barack Obama by demonizing him by association with an "unrepentent domestic terrorist." I invite you to read Mr. Ayers’s complete statement, titled "The Real Bill Ayers" and published yesterday in The New York Times.

The comments on Mr. Ayers’s statement are also instructive. Times readers are well-educated, well-informed, and generally very thoughtful.

Why Pakistanis aren't protesting the Mumbai massacre

In his op-ed piece today in The New York Times ("Calling All Pakistanis"), Thomas L. Friedman asks a question:

On Feb. 6, 2006, three Pakistanis died in Peshawar and Lahore during violent street protests against Danish cartoons that had satirized the Prophet Muhammad. More such mass protests followed weeks later. When Pakistanis and other Muslims are willing to take to the streets, even suffer death, to protest an insulting cartoon published in Denmark, is it fair to ask: Who in the Muslim world, who in Pakistan, is ready to take to the streets to protest the mass murders of real people, not cartoon characters, right next door in Mumbai? [emphasis mine]
    ...We know from the Danish cartoons affair that Pakistanis and other Muslims know how to mobilize quickly to express their heartfelt feelings, not just as individuals, but as a powerful collective. That is what is needed here.

Maybe Thomas L. Friedman is right that such a protest is needed. But I doubt that it's going to happen. And I have a question of my own: Why not?

The reason seems to be that people in a Muslim society (people who fancy themselves completely subservient to "Allah") don't seem to ever get that motivated unless they think their religious dignity is being insulted or threatened. Obviously, people who think their religion calls on them to kill other people (even by killing themselves to accomplish it) value their religious beliefs incommensurably higher than they do lives (even their own). Fortunately not many Muslims (but still a horrifying number) sign up to strap on the explosives, but unfortunately, as Sam Harris reported in his 2004 book, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, an international Pew Research Center survey indicates that quite significant percentages of Muslims in many countries feel that it is acceptable to kill in "defense of Islam"—whatever that means¹.

I don't have a copy of Harris's book to quote from, but I did find on the web a May 22, 2007 Pew Research Center report on Muslim Americans [2019: no longer available apparently]. The report appears to derive from later findings of the same Pew Global Attitudes Project that Harris cited. American Muslim responses to the question, "Can suicide bombing of civilian targets to defend Islam be justified? How often?" are compared with those of Muslims in some European, African, and Middle Eastern countries. The percentages of Muslims who responded:

    "Often/sometimes"     ["Rarely"]
U.S. (all Muslims):    8%    [5%]
    (younger than 30):    15%    [11%]
France:    16%    [19%]
Spain:    16%    [9%]
Great Britain:    15%    [9%]
Germany:    7%    [6%]
Nigeria:    46%    [23%]
Jordan:    29%    [28%]
Egypt:    28%    [25%]
Turkey:    17%    [9%]
Pakistan:    14%    [8%]
Indonesia:    10%    [18%] [pp. 59-60]

I quote the "rarely" answers [in brackets] because Harris added those figures to the "often/sometimes" answers to come up with the percentage who felt that suicide bombing to defend Islam could be justified at least in some circumstances. Thus, he might have said: In the United States, 26% of Muslims 18-29 feel that suicide bombing to defend Islam can be justified. Which is how USA Today reported it:

Poll: A quarter of younger Muslim Americans support suicide bombings in some circumstances

My point is that there seems to be a swell of opinion among Muslims that religion tops everything (as in mine versus yours [or your life]). So don't expect any protests of the Mumbai killings in Pakistan.
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1. Were the Catholics from Europe "defending Christianity" when they punished or put to death the Aztecs who wouldn't convert?

"Other possibilities beyond the brute either/or...."

Another edifying passage from Julian Barnes's Nothing to Be Frightened Of:

In one of my novels I had a character imagine that there must be other possibilities beyond the brute either/or, the ultimate would-you-rather, of 1. God exists, or 2. God doesn't exist. So there were various alluring heresies, like: 3. God used to exist, but doesn't anymore; 4. God does exist, but has abandoned us; 8. God did exist, and will exist again, but doesn't exist at the moment—He is merely taking a divine sabbatical (which would explain a lot); and so on. My character got up to number 15 (there is no God, but there is eternal life) by the time he, and I, reached the end of our imagining powers.
    One possibility we didn't consider was that God is the ultimate ironist. Just as scientists set up laboratory experiments with rats, mazes, and pieces of cheese placed behind the correct door, so God might have set up His own experiment, with us playing rat. Our task is to locate the door behind which eternal life is hidden. Near one possible exit we hear distant ethereal music, near another smell a whiff of incense; golden light gleams around a third. We press against all these doors, yet none of them yields. With increasing urgency—for we know that the cunning box we find ourselves in is called mortality—we try to escape. But what we don't understand is that our non-escaping is the whole point of the experiment. There are many fake doors, but no real one, because there is no eternal life. The game thought up by God the ironist is this: to plant immortal longings in an undeserving creature and then observe the consequences. To watch these humans, freighted with consciousness and intelligence, rushing around like frantic rats. To see how one group of them instructs everyone else that their door (which even they can't open) is the only correct one, and then perhaps starts killing anyone who puts money on a different door. Wouldn't that be fun? [p. 187]

"It is difficult for us to contemplate...."

A passage from Julian Barnes's recent book of ruminations on death, Nothing to Be Frightened Of, that I found particularly compatible with my own view:

It is difficult for us to contemplate, fixedly, the possibility, let alone the certainty, that life is a matter of cosmic hazard, its fundamental purpose mere self-perpetuation, that it unfolds in emptiness, that our planet will one day drift in frozen silence, and that the human species, as it has developed in all its frenzied and over-engineered complexity, will completely disappear and not be missed, because there is nobody and nothing out there to miss us. This is what growing up means. And it is a frightening prospect for a race which has for so long relied upon its own invented gods for explanation and consolation. Here is a Catholic journalist rebuking Richard Dawkins for poisoning the hearts and minds of the young: "Intellectual monsters like Hategod Dawkie spread their despairing gospel of nihilism, pointlessness, vacuity, the emptiness of life, the lack of significance anywhere at any time and, in case you don't know this useful word, floccinaucinihilipilification." (It means "estimating as worthless.") Behind the excess, and the misrepresentation, of the attack, you can smell the fear. Believe in what I believe—believe in God, and purpose, and the promise of eternal life—because the alternative is [expletive] terrifying.... [pp.171-172]

"I am thankful"

Some years ago I attended a Thanksgiving dinner at which the hostess asked everyone to "go around the table" and say what he or she was thankful for. I enjoyed the experience, and I probably addressed my expression of thanks to "God," perhaps as "Heavenly Mother" rather than as "Heavenly Father," depending on whether this happened before or after I grew tired of the general tendency among Christians (as among Jews and Muslims) to refer to deity as masculine.

As I anticipate going over to our neighbors (in less than two hours!), I've found myself wondering whether anyone will make a similar suggestion. In anticipation of the possibility, I've looked up "thankful" in Webster's:

1: conscious of benefit received <for what we are about to receive make us truly ~>
2: expressive of thanks <~ service>
3: well-pleased: GLAD <he was ~ that the room was dark>

I have long thought that thankfulness in the first sense is too important to relegate to a single day of the year, for such mindfulness encourages compassion and humility. We might not have been so lucky. Can we justify thinking that we deserve our luck more than others deserve their lack of it?

But Thanksgiving as an annual event, as a holiday, tends to make us think about things from a larger perspective, even a national one. But I've already been thankful ever since November 4 that come January 20 we won't need to put quotes around "president" any more. A larger perspective for me is remembering some of the people (such as Gary) who can't be with us (or with anyone else) today. They died young or they died violently or they just died unexpectedly.

On this particular Thanksgiving, I will remember that, for the "national turkey" named Pumpkin pardoned yesterday by our current "president," there are literally millions of turkeys that were recently slaughtered (or slaughtered weeks ago and frozen) so that creatures higher on the food chain could gorge themselves today. And lots of other animals as well. To me, that's very sad. In a couple of hours I mean to be mindful of the sacrifice of the free-range turkey our neighbors have been baking this morning.

Postscript

Actually, only one of our neighbors baked the turkey; the other baked a cut of free-range pig. Unfortunately, each animal's flesh was so delicious (as also was the sweet potatoes, the stuffing, the cranberry sauce, the brown gravy, the Brussels sprouts and carrots, the green beans, the dinner rolls, and the wine, all followed by pumpkin pie, chocolate-pecan-Kahlua-bourbon pie, wine cake, and New Orleans chickory coffee) I barely paused to remember that the two animals had been deprived of their range, not to mention their lives, for the very purpose that distracted me.

It isn't easy to be thankful, especially in America, where we have perhaps too much to be thankful for.

Half a world population ago

In 1968, a couple of years after Lunar Orbiter I made the first images of Earth—back when the planet's human population was half what it is today—I gave a talk recommending zero population growth at a meeting of a chapter of the American Association of University Women.

Many of those present had already heard the term zero population growth, and some may have read Stanford University ecologist Paul Ehrlich's bestseller of that year, The Population Bomb, which was among my primary sources of information. The basic idea was that if humans, on average and as a personal commitment, produced just enough offspring to replace themselves (two per couple), then population could remain approximately constant. Zero population growth. Or, as an entry in Wikipedia puts it, "In the long term, zero population growth can be achieved when the birth rate of a population equals the death rate...."

Ehrlich's predictions of worldwide famines between 1970 and 1985 because of overpopulation may have failed in their details, but few informed people today doubt that overpopulation has driven and continues to drive global warming, including unmistakable changes in weather patterns, shrinking polar icecaps, and the rising acidity of oceans (some of the increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere going into the formation of carbolic acid)—all of which have stark consequences for life on earth.

For along with rising numbers of humans come their rising expectations, which can be summarized briefly as expecting to live like an American. You know, drive an SUV and produce, by Third World standards, an astounding amount of garbage.

I don't know how accurate Erhlich's 1968 prediction was for when the Earth's population would double (I'd have to read his book again to check), but he did expect it to double. He knew how difficult it would be to achieve ZPG, because, to quote Wikipedia again, "a country's population growth is often determined by economic factors, incidence of poverty, natural disasters, disease, etc."

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, here are the Earth's population figures for 1966 and 2008: 3,416,212,203 and 6,677,602,292 (doubling in those 42 years). Its prediction for the next 42 years (2050) is 9,392,797,012. While that would be a growth of less than half the preceding period, remember that the extra people will be hustling to realize their growing expectations...so long as conditions don't worsen to the point where such expectations are impossible to maintain and many will give up hustling in favor of desperately hoping and waiting for an afterlife.

Wait...or hustle?

Thought for the day

Reading Dick and Felix Francis's 2007 novel, Dead Heat, this morning, I found on pages 176-177:

Who was it, I thought, who said, "Things may come to those who wait"?
    ...
    I asked my computer who said the quote. It came back with the answer: Abraham Lincoln. But his full quote was: "Things may come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle."

I too asked my computer about the quote, and a number of sites have it and attribute it to Lincoln, but none of the ones I found indicate where or when Lincoln wrote or uttered it.

A plumbing company (I don't think it was Joe the Plumber's) recast the first clause in the more New Age or New Testament way: "Good things [emphasis mine] come to those who wait, but only the things left over by those who hustle." (Strict New Agers and fundamental New Testament folks, of course, don't include the second part, intent as they are to sit back and wait for the good things to roll in without any more effort than it takes to be optimistic.)

The intent of Lincoln's statement seems to be to recommend hustling as the way to get the best things, since otherwise you'll get only the things that the hustlers didn't manage to get or didn't want.

Of course, many a hustler comes a cropper. And some waiters come into a fortune. I wonder whether Lincoln said anything about luck? Of course, there's the business of the "Lucky Penny" charm. Was that a Lincoln penny?

The only possible Lincoln quote containing "luck" that I could find through a spot of googling was one site's claim that Lincoln said (or wrote): "The harder I work, the luckier I get." Lincoln really did seem to recommend that we hustle.

Early image of Earth newly restored

On Monday, The New York Times editorial, "The Moon View," published a newly restored image of our planet photographed from the first lunar orbiter, in 1966. More attractive images (in color) have of course since been made, but, as the editorial concludes:

What is most evocative is the awareness that this is our planet in 1966, which feels like a very long time ago. A train of thought immediately presents itself. If scientists can recover extensive new information from old electronic data, shouldn’t there be some way to peer beneath those clouds, back in time, and see how this planet looked when it had only half its current population? [emphasis mine]
    It is probably not possible to say that one Earth is ever more innocent than another. And yet there is a feeling of innocence hanging over that beclouded planet, which was just about to get the first glimpse of itself from the Moon.

“Of the two, one has been a big success....”

The story of the comic beginnings of “Doonesbury” is told in an April 11, 2008 article in the Yale Daily News, “For Trudeau, Road to Comic Fame Began on York Street,” by staff reporter Raymond Carlson.

The strip’s creator took some of his initial attempts at cartooning to Reed Hundt, Yale College ’69, LAW ’74, the executive editor of the Yale Daily News, who was interviewed for his side of the story:

After rifling through the first three or four comic strips, Hundt shrugged. He was impressed with the artist’s humor, but less so with his drawing ability.
    Still, Hundt agreed to run the strip.
    “Sure. We print pretty much anything,” the young man recalled the editor saying.
    Little did Hundt know that he had recruited Garry Trudeau, [Yale College] ’70, ART ’73, future creator of “Doonesbury” and now, one of the most widely syndicated cartoonists alive.

Hundt recalled that during his junior year, Trudeau lived above him and George W. Bush lived below.

According to Hundt, Trudeau—a member of Scroll and Key—was amiable, “dashing,” “witty,” and “intensely verbal.” Bush, [Yale College] ’68, too, was “agreeable,” “genial,” but he [was] the center of the Davenport College social life as the go-to source of alcohol for his classmates. [emphasis mine]
    Still, Hundt said, “Of the two, one has been a big success—that would be Garry.”

"He's half-white, you know"

Garry Trudeau had no backup for today's "Doonesbury" in case Obama didn't win the election, and most newspapers planned to hold today's strip until tomorrow (or never), just in case. But not The Los Angeles Times.