Secular or sacred?

Os Guiness offers an enlightening review of a new book, Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide in The Wilson Quarterly.

They're taking over the planet

"So fast is this group growing that, under current trends, according to Rutz, the entire world will be composed of such believers by the year 2032." WorldNetDaily has more on them.

Not our kind of science

The Telegraph has very credible evidence that the scientific journals Nature and Science are censoring certain views on global warming.

It all started when...

Dr Naomi Oreskes, of the University of California, analysed almost 1,000 papers on the subject published since the early 1990s, and concluded that 75 per cent of them either explicitly or implicitly backed the consensus view [that global warming is happening and is caused by humans], while none directly dissented from it.

Dr Oreskes's study is now routinely cited by those demanding action on climate change, including the Royal Society and Prof Sir David King, the Government's chief scientific adviser.

But that kind of slam dunk sends up red flags to serious academics. Nothing has that kind of consensus. So...

Dr Benny Peiser, a senior lecturer in the science faculty at Liverpool John Moores University [...] decided to conduct his own analysis of the same set of 1,000 documents - and concluded that only one third backed the consensus view, while only one per cent did so explicitly.

And he's not alone:

Prof Dennis Bray, of the GKSS National Research Centre in Geesthacht, Germany, submitted results from an international study showing that fewer than one in 10 climate scientists believed that climate change is principally caused by human activity.

If these journals are biased about something so straightforward as summarizing conclusions of studies, what should we expect from them on something less objective?

The World Is Flat

A must-read review of Tom Friedman's new book in the The New York Times Sunday Book Review . Sweet spot:

The metaphor of a flat world, used by Friedman to describe the next phase of globalization, is ingenious. It came to him after hearing an Indian software executive explain how the world's economic playing field was being leveled. For a variety of reasons, what economists call ''barriers to entry'' are being destroyed; today an individual or company anywhere can collaborate or compete globally. Bill Gates explains the meaning of this transformation best. Thirty years ago, he tells Friedman, if you had to choose between being born a genius in Mumbai or Shanghai and an average person in Poughkeepsie, you would have chosen Poughkeepsie because your chances of living a prosperous and fulfilled life were much greater there. ''Now,'' Gates says, ''I would rather be a genius born in China than an average guy born in Poughkeepsie.''

Speaking of Africa

OxBlog citing this in WaPo asks why Charles Taylor (the African killer, not the Canadian philosopher) isn't on our terrorist list. Good question.

Movie pick

Went to see The Interpreter and was surprised to see how much it's about Africa. The context is a combination of Congo/Zaire, Zimbabwe and half a dozen other liberation-turned-tyrannical governments. Really well-acted and interesting story. But more than that, it embodies the angst of those of us who love the continent and can't come up with a simple way to help.

His Brain, Her Brain

Scientific American relates a study that demonstrates that "gender" may not be just cultural:

The researchers presented a group of vervet monkeys with a selection of toys, including rag dolls, trucks and some gender-neutral items such as picture books. They found that male monkeys spent more time playing with the 'masculine' toys than their female counterparts did, and female monkeys spent more time interacting with the playthings typically preferred by girls. Both sexes spent equal time monkeying with the picture books and other gender-neutral toys.

More than that, day-old babies respond differently based on their sex.

Reading stuff like this makes you less intelligent

Text messaging, AIMing and other forms of incessant communication are a distraction according to The Scotsman's summary of a new study. Sweet spot:

CONSTANT text messaging and e-mailing causes a reduction in mental capability equivalent to the loss of ten IQ points, according to research.

Tapping away on a mobile phone or computer keypad or checking messages on a handheld gadget temporarily reduces the performance of the brain, according to the study into the effects of "infomania".

Stop reading this now, while you still can!

Paradoxes of teen sex

David Brooks offers argument that teens are less sexually active than we think:

When you actually look at the intimate life of America's youth, you find this heterodoxical pattern: people can seem raunchy on the surface but are wholesome within. There are Ivy League sex columnists who don't want anybody to think they are loose. There are foul-mouthed Maxim readers terrified they will someday divorce, like their parents. Eminem hardly seems like a paragon of traditional morality, but what he's really angry about is that he comes from a broken home, and what he longs for is enough suburban bliss to raise his daughter.

Read it all. Tom Wolfe certainly has a different take in his latest, which I'm reading. Safe bet that there's more to be said here on both sides.

Stop the (Guttenberg) presses!

The Independent reports on a breakthrough in technology that is unlocking some unreadable Greek manuscripts:

For more than a century, it has caused excitement and frustration in equal measure - a collection of Greek and Roman writings so vast it could redraw the map of classical civilisation. If only it was legible.

Now, in a breakthrough described as the classical equivalent of finding the holy grail, Oxford University scientists have employed infra-red technology to open up the hoard, known as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, and with it the prospect that hundreds of lost Greek comedies, tragedies and epic poems will soon be revealed.

In the past four days alone, Oxford's classicists have used it to make a series of astonishing discoveries, including writing by Sophocles, Euripides, Hesiod and other literary giants of the ancient world, lost for millennia.

Then this:

They even believe they are likely to find lost Christian gospels, the originals of which were written around the time of the earliest books of the New Testament.

A less-than-firm grasp on the doctrine of scriptural transmission and canonicity. But fascinating, all the same.

No kidding

The Globalization Institute has a book report with a no-brainer conclusion:

The Shackled Continent is an important book. Written by Robert Guest, Africa Editor of The Economist, it provides an illuminating account of why Africa is so poor. His conclusion is that sub-Saharan Africa is poor because it is shackled by poor government. Guest has spent six years reporting from Africa, and fills the book with accounts of what he has witnessed.

Guest argues for "fair aid, free trade". He explains how aid has often been wasted on arms, to provide luxuries for the ruling elite, and to be put away in Swiss bank accounts. African leaders sometimes call for a "Marshall Plan" to help Africa like the Marshall Plan that helped rebuild Europe after World War II. But, as Guest explains, Africa has already received the equivalent of six Marshall Plans, and yet is still poor.

Told ya

says Victor Davis Hanson to Scowcroft, Brzezinski, and Albright.

Protest in Shanghai

Ian Hamet thinks the leadership is scapegoating Japan: "I think someone in Beijing, someone who is all too familiar with both The Prince and The Art of War, has been working to divert frustration to a more acceptable target."

The evangelical pope?

Evangelical historian Mark Noll assesses the ways in which John Paul II did and did not bring evangelicals and Catholics closer.

Number Two?

Peter Drucker gives his take on the direction of the world economy in The National Interest. The U.S. will be strong for a long time, but is not the single dominant economy any more.

Drucker sees four world economies emergin: a world economy of information; of money; of multinationals (one no longer dominated by American enterprises); and a mercantilist world economy of goods, services and trade.

Information:

In the long run, the most important implication is probably the impact of information on mentality and awareness. It creates new affinities and new communities. The woman student in Shanghai who taps into the Internet remains Chinese, but she sees herself at the same time as a member of a worldwide, non-national "information society." ....

Money

The next major economic crisis will most probably be a crisis of the U.S. dollar in the world economy....

The government deficit is therefore being financed almost in its entirety by foreign investments in the United States, mostly in government securities like short-term treasury notes and medium-term bonds. The Japanese are converting most, if not all, of their trade surplus with the United States into dollar-denominated U.S. government securities and have thus become the largest U.S. creditor....

This, needless to say, is an unstable and volatile system. It would collapse if the foreign holders of U.S. government securities (above all, the Japanese) were for whatever reason (such as a crash in their own economy) to dump their holdings of U.S. government securities....

Multinationals:

There were 7,258 multinational companies worldwide in 1969. Thirty-one years later, in 2000, the number had increased ninefold to more than 63,000. By that year, multinationals accounted for 80 percent of the world's industrial production....

American-based multinationals are only a fraction--and a diminishing one--of all multinationals. Only 185 of the world's 500 largest multinationals--fewer than 40 percent--are headquartered in the United States (the European Union has 126, Japan 108). And multinationals are growing much faster outside the United States, especially in Japan, Mexico, and lately, Brazil....

The New Mercantilism

The modern state was invented by the French political philosopher Jean Bodin in his 1576 book Six Livres de la Republique. He invented the state for one purpose only: to generate the cash needed to pay the soldiers defending France against a Spanish army financed by silver from the New World--the first standing army since the Romans' more than a thousand years earlier....

However discredited as economic theory, mercantilism, not Adam Smith's free trade, thus became the policy and practice of governments virtually everywhere....

But mercantilism is increasingly becoming the policy of "blocs" rather than of individual nation-states. These blocs--with the European Union the most structured one, and the U.S.-dominated NAFTA trying to embrace the entire Western Hemisphere (or at least North and Central America)--are becoming the integrating units of the new world economy. Each bloc is trying to establish free trade internally and to abolish within the bloc all hurdles, restrictions and impediments, first to the movement of goods and money and ultimately to the movement of people. The United States, for instance, has proposed extending NAFTA to embrace all of Central America.

At the same time, each bloc is becoming more protectionist against the outside....

For thirty years after World War II, the U.S. economy dominated practically without serious competition. For another twenty years it was clearly the world's foremost economy and especially the undisputed leader in technology and innovation.

.... it is facing rivals that, either singly or in combination, could conceivably make America Number Two.

This has important repercussions for all sorts of American organizations paying American workers in U.S. dollars.

A more exciting, animated you

Real-time virtual animation now allows a "second-life" in a virtual world. As if I need a whole new dimension in which to deal with my pathologies.

The next Pope matters to all of us

as George Wiegel, official biographer of John Paul II points out, to Catholics, friends of Catholics, enemies of Christianity, and the politically involved for any other reason.

Voltaire would be spinning in his grave at the thought of the papacy as a defender of the "rights of man;" and I rather doubt that Huxley imagined the papacy as a counterweight to the evolution of the brave new world. Yet precisely such hopes-- and fears--may be found throughout the world today, in this twenty-seventh year of the pontificate of John Paul II.

He sees three big issues the next pope will face, as indicated by present discussions among the College of Cardinals:

The first of these is the virtual collapse of Christianity in its historic heartland--western Europe. The second great issue is the Church's response to the multi-faceted challenge posed by the rise of militant Islam. And the third involves the questions posed by the biotech revolution.

Read the whole thing to see how he develops these.

God and Caesar in China

China now has the world�s second-largest evangelical Christian population, second only to the United States. A new book, God and Caesar in China examines China's religion policy, the history and growth of Catholic and Protestant churches in China, and the implications of church-state friction for relations between the United States and China, concluding with recommendations for U.S. policy. Contributors include Daniel H. Bays (Calvin College), Mickey Spiegel (Human Rights Watch), Chan Kim-kwong (Hong Kong Christian Council), Jean-Paul Wiest (Chinese University of Hong Kong), Richard Madsen (University of California, San Diego), Xu Yihua (Fudan University), and Liu Peng (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences).

Generation Y embraces choice, redefines religion

A recent study summarized in the Washington Times finds "that 23 percent of Generation Y, like Generation X, do not identify with a religious denomination or don't believe in God. This is more than twice the number of nonbelievers among baby boomers...."

The good news is that the survey paints a composite picture of a generation who are seekers far more than they are drifters – a world away from their portrayal as stereotypical automatons we so often imagine as receiving their values directly from Paris Hilton or Justin Timberlake’s PR spokesperson. They are actively considering questions of identity, community, and meaning – negotiating how important their religious identities will ultimately be – but doing so with their own friends, in their own homes, and in their own ways.

Well, sorta good news, maybe.

In the gay guerilla wars...

Andrew Sullivan can't clock a week without a rant about the equal rights of gays to wed. But to add a datum to an understanding of what "marriage" means for him, consider his treatment of the Terri Schiavo case. He can whale on conservatives. He can declare, "Those of us who have long worried that unleashing religious fundamentalism into the bloodstream of American politics would lead to disaster can only feel that our fears have now come true."

But he has nothing but admiration for Michael Schiavo. No suspicion that Mr. Schiavo may not be suitably qualified as a "husband" when he is living with another woman, mother to two of his children. The actual commitments of a marriage are irrelevant to Andrew. It's all about the using any means and any line of argumentation necessary. Let the courts decide.

Unless your conclusions are better served by leaving the question to those closest to the person:

If limited government means anything, it means leaving decisions like this as close to the person as possible.

Unless leaving the decisions to the closest persons by any moral standard--Terri's parents, who never abandonned their role, wanted to care for her--do not serve your conclusions.

Unless your conclusions are better served by leaving the question to state government:

And if the American principle of federalism means anything, it means that the local state's courts are the only relevant instruments to deal with such a tragedy.

Unless... some other gymnastic line of reasoning serves your interests.

Terri Schiavo's case was rare and certainly no precedent...right?

Well, maybe just one more time.

Outside looking in

Jerry Bowyer comments:

Terri Schiavo died for one simple and tragic reason: The wrong people are in charge of our cultural and judicial institutions. Servants of the culture of death were inside the courthouse wearing robes and making decisions or carrying notebooks and writing the coverage. Servants of the culture of life were outside the courthouse carrying placards and kneeling in prayer. If their positions had been reversed, Terri would be living, breathing and receiving much-needed therapy. Terri died because, for the most part, we're activists and for the most part they're leaders. We are morally informed activists, dedicated to truth and life, but of limited judicial and public relations competence. They are extremely skilled in lawand media, and barbaric in moral code.

Jesus told the Parable of the Unjust Steward to teach the lesson that,'...the sons of this world are more shrewd in their generation than the sons of light.' What was true in that generation is also true in ours, so either we smarten up, or our cultural drift deepens and more innocents will die horribly.

Overstated, but not by much.

Excerpts from the obituary on John Paul II by George Weigel in the WSJ:

He once described his high-school years as a time in which he was "completely absorbed" by a passion for the theater. So it was fitting that Karol Jozef Wojtyla lived a very dramatic life. As a young man, he risked summary execution by leading clandestine acts of cultural resistance to the Nazi occupation of Poland. As a fledgling priest, he adopted a Stalin-era nom de guerre--Wujek, "uncle"--while creating zones of intellectual and spiritual freedom for college students; those students, now older men and women themselves, called him Wujek to the end....

The world will remember the drama of this life in the days ahead, even as it measures John Paul II's many other accomplishments: his transformation of the papacy from a managerial office to one of evangelical witness; his voluminous teaching, touching virtually every aspect of contemporary life; his dogged pursuit of Christian unity; his success in blocking the Clinton administration's efforts to have abortion-on-demand declared a basic human right; his remarkable magnetism for young people; his groundbreaking initiatives with Judaism; his robust defense of religious freedom as the first of human rights....

John Paul II was the most visible human being in history, having been seen live by more men and women than any other man who ever lived; the remarkable thing is that millions of those people, who saw him only at a great distance, will think they have lost a friend....

In a 1968 letter to the French Jesuit theologian, Henri de Lubac, then-Cardinal Karol Wojtyla suggested that "a degradation, indeed a pulverization, of the fundamental uniqueness of each human person" was at the root of the 20th century's grim record: two World Wars, Auschwitz and the Gulag, a Cold War threatening global disaster, oceans of blood and mountains of corpses. How had a century begun with such high hopes for the human future produced mankind's greatest catastrophes? Because, Karol Wojtyla proposed, Western humanism had gone off the rails, collapsing into forms of self-absorption, and then self-doubt, so severe that men and women had begun to wonder whether there was any truth at all to be found in the world, or in themselves.

This profound crisis of culture, this crisis in the very idea of the human, had manifested itself in the serial crises that had marched across the surface of contemporary history, leaving carnage in their wake. But unlike some truly "conservative" critics of late modernity, Wojtyla's counter-proposal was not rollback: rather, it was a truer, nobler humanism, built on the foundation of the biblical conviction that God had made the human creature in His image and likeness, with intelligence and free will, a creature capable of knowing the good and freely choosing it. That, John Paul II insisted in a vast number of variations on one great theme, was the true measure of man--the human capacity, in cooperation with God's grace, for heroic virtue....

After the Cold War, when more than a few analysts and politicians were in a state of barely restrained euphoria, imagining a golden age of inevitable progress for the cause of political and economic freedom, John Paul II saw more deeply and clearly. He quickly decoded new threats to what he had called, in that 1968 letter to Father de Lubac, the "inviolable mystery of the human person," and so he spent much of the 1990s explaining that freedom untethered from moral truth risks self-destruction.

For if there is only your truth and my truth and neither one of us recognizes a transcendent moral standard (call it "the truth") by which to settle our differences, then either you will impose your power on me or I will impose my power on you; Nietszche, great, mad prophet of the 20th century, got at least that right. Freedom uncoupled from truth, John Paul taught, leads to chaos and thence to new forms of tyranny. For, in the face of chaos (or fear), raw power will inexorably replace persuasion, compromise, and agreement as the coin of the political realm. The false humanism of freedom misconstrued as "I did it my way" inevitably leads to freedom's decay, and then to freedom's self-cannibalization. This was not the soured warning of an antimodern scold; this was the sage counsel of a man who had given his life to freedom's cause from 1939 on.

Thus the key to the freedom project in the 21st century, John Paul urged, lay in the realm of culture: in vibrant public moral cultures capable of disciplining and directing the tremendous energies--economic, political, aesthetic, and, yes, sexual--set loose in free societies. A vibrant public moral culture is essential for democracy and the market, for only such a culture can inculcate and affirm the virtues necessary to make freedom work.... (emphasis added)

Requiescat in pace

Women in the workplace and the world

A survey of women's global demographic changes: includes this: "Women now comprise an increasing share of the world's labour force---at least one third in all regions except northern Africa and western Asia."

But in status, pay, human rights, decision-making, and the sex trade, women are suffering.

The cities are coming! The cities are coming!

Here's a summary of what we know about global urbanization. A sample:

In 1800, London was the only city in the world with a population of a million people.

The number of cities with 5 million inhabitants or more will pass from 41 in 2000 to 59 in 2015. Among those cities, the number of 'mega-cities' (those with 10 million inhabitants or more) will increase from 19 in 2000 to 23 in 2015.

And a graph showing rural and urban population shifts that you will probably see better by going there yourself:

The right question

Eric Cohen argues that the question is not, as modern liberalism would have it, What would Terri Schiavo want?

For some, it is an article of faith that individuals should decide for themselves how to be cared for in such cases. And no doubt one response to the Schiavo case will be a renewed call for living wills and advance directives--as if the tragedy here were that Michael Schiavo did not have written proof of Terri's desires. But the real lesson of the Schiavo case is not that we all need living wills; it is that our dignity does not reside in our will alone, and that it is foolish to believe that the competent person I am now can establish, in advance, how I should be cared for if I become incapacitated and incompetent. The real lesson is that we are not mere creatures of the will: We still possess dignity and rights even when our capacity to make free choices is gone; and we do not possess the right to demand that others treat us as less worthy of care than we really are.

Cohen doesn't note an important point that I would add. The founders spoke of rights given to us by our Creator as "unalienable," in reaction to the likes of Thomas Hobbes. What does "unalienable" mean? Hobbes saw that if rights are possessions, then there are circumstances under which it can be assumed that we have transfered our rights to the state. But rights aren't possessions in that sense, so they are unalienable, even by our own will.

Suspicious minds

The most religious Americans are more suspicious of Muslims, according to a recent survey.
The Atlantic Online summarizes the relevant part of the report thus:

Jesus taught Christians to "love thy neighbor." According to a recent survey by researchers at Cornell University, however, the more religious the American, the less likely he is to love (or at least trust) his Muslim neighbors. For instance, 42 percent of the highly religious (versus only 15 percent of citizens who are "not very religious") believe that American Muslims should have to register their whereabouts with the government; 34 percent (versus 13 percent) say that U.S. mosques should be monitored; and 40 percent (versus 19 percent) look favorably on government infiltration of Islamic civic and volunteer organizations. The highly religious are also more distrustful the more attention they pay to TV news. While it's true that all the 9/11 terrorists were Muslims, none of them were Americans. So why do the religious mistrust American Muslims? The survey contains a hint: 65 percent of "highly religious" Americans believe that Islam is more likely than other faiths to encourage violence.

The results of the survey can be interpreted in more than one way. This editor at the Atlantic Online attributes these suspicions to ignorant prejudice and hypocrisy. Christians are, of course, just demonstrating what everyone knows about Christians since the Crusades, 1492, Servetus and all that. And as for hypocrisy, well, it's a given.

Hmmm. In the general population "the most religious" generally take religious differences most seriously. The non-religious, especially the militantly secular, sometimes sees all religions as equally suspect and susceptible to blind prejudice and dangerous fanaticism. Many in the secular media have more worries about Christians than Muslims because, well, they just do. They tend to overlook incidents such as that unfortunate series of events preceding the Crusades, the first widespread encounter between Christianity and Islam, when Islam first offered to direct the future course of Europe. (The offer was declined.) And they tend to overlook a certain statistical pattern connecting religion and terrorism today. Could it be that there are actual reasons for suspicion? The survey does not indicate whether the most religious actually know more than the non-religious about the history and beliefs of Islam. Nor does it take a position on that history and belief system, but just ignores that what the peerless Islamologist Bernard Lewis has called Islam's "bloody borders."

But, on the other hand, American Muslims don't have a record of violence in their short history.

So the reaction of "the most religious" to their Muslim neighbors could be based in ignorant prejudice and hypocrisy, or in knowledgeable prejudice, or in some combination of the two.

The same could be true of the reaction of the Atlantic.

It's never too late to fail...

but this piece in The American Enterprise on the post-Iraq War impact is encouraging.

Mayflies

by Richard Wilbur

In somber forest, when the sun was low,
I saw from unseen pools a mist of flies
In their quadrillions rise
And animate a ragged patch of glow
With sudden glittering--as when a crowd
Of stars appear
Through a brief gad in black and driven cloud,
One arc of their great round-dance showing clear.

It was no muddled swarm I witnessed, for
In entrechats each fluttering insect there
Rose two steep yards in air,
Then slowly floated down to climb once more,
So that they all composed a manifold
And figured scene,
And seemed the weavers of some cloth of gold,
Or the fine pistons of some bright machine.

Watching those life long dancers of a day
As night closed in, I felt myself alone
In a life too much my own,
More mortal in my separateness than they--
Unless, I thought, I had been called to be
Not fly or star
But one whose task is joyfully to see
How fair the fiats of the caller are.

----------

Buy this book.