bob, can u pleeze actually share this "evidence" of a larger purpose? i'd love to finally hear it. or did you share it at some point and i just missed it? secondly, i think agnosticism can make sense, uh.....in the sense that we've never had contact with some parts of the universe because it's expanding so fast. however, it makes more sense to be atheist because you've gotten so wrapped up in the subject you've forgotten that it makes no sense to ask about it in the first place. i'm not denying theism because there's nothing to deny in the first place. i see no reason to defend my lack of belief in a magic carrot in the sky that controls all life because it's not a matter of discussion in the first place. it's kinda like conservative philosophy: not even invited to the table
got it?
you: we can't ever know if 4,000 cats live in the middle of the sun so you have to be agnostic about this question.
us: what?

hey, he lip synced in that Mowtown link! wtf?!

After listening to Bob talk about his book, there is no way I will buy it or read it. To oversimplify and exaggerate, Bob is an intellectual lightweight - a squishy liberal who wants us all to sit around the campfire, sing Kumbaya and hug each other. He looks at the world and interprets everything in a context that will lead to his ideal world. His view is as narcissistic as the religious. It is pretty clear that man invented god. Like the religious, Bob still looks at everything with the central focus on this one species, homo sapiens, that lives on one planet in one solar system in one galaxy in one local group of galaxies in one supercluster of galactic groups in one universe. There is nothing special about us (except to ourselves). What, if anything, is special about consciousness? For all we know, it is a fluke and evolutionary error. Purpose and direction are human interpretations of events which allow the focus to be on its own species. Bob just assumes purpose and uses it to argue direction. And he says that the only logically acceptable positions are agnosticism

Just started watching, but I had to pause for laughter and to say this: As I said before, Bob, it's your site. Talk about your book as much as you'd like. It'd be nice to hear you grilled by a hardcore atheist, but whatever. However, asking Ann Althouse what counts as excessive self-promotion is like asking someone with Tourette's Syndrome, "Do you think I swear too much?" ========== [Added] Your definition of atheism and your assertion of how "it's commonly understood" is yet another indication to me that you are not really all that familiar with people (like Dawkins and Hitchens) whom you spend so much breath railing against. You're entitled to mean whatever you want by a given word, but you're mistaken to claim that people who use the term to self-identify mean the same thing as you. Put briefly, the statements "I do not believe in God" and "I am absolutely certain God does not exist" are not the same thing. This has been beaten to death in your own site's forums, so I'll leave it at that. Just know that for all your concern about offending sensibilities, this is a place where you are indeed guilty. [Added2] This was

Quoting thprop: His view is as narcissistic as the religious. It is pretty clear that man invented god. Like the religious, Bob still looks at everything with the central focus on this one species, homo sapiens, that lives on one planet in one solar system in one galaxy in one local group of galaxies in one supercluster of galactic groups in one universe. There is nothing special about us (except to ourselves). What, if anything, is special about consciousness? For all we know, it is a fluke and evolutionary error. Purpose and direction are human interpretations of events which allow the focus to be on its own species. Bob just assumes purpose and uses it to argue direction..

"There is nothing special about us (except to ourselves)" True enough, but how do you know that our opinion about ourselves is "narcissistic?" And, even more crucially, how do you know that it is false? Presumably, because you think it is possible to take a godlike view of the universe and assert that, from such a viewpoint, we are indeed nothing (or nothing much). But this viewpoint is no more true to reality than its opposite: it is a

This gets the prize for best diavlog title (although I think it should only have one "d"). Maybe that would be better than the current "Percontations".

I am definitely one of those guys that sees religious ideas as a font of alot of problems in certain societies. I am not as strident as Hitchens or Dawkins though, they see no capacity for good in religions at all, which I find insane. It does not have to be right to be useful and helpful for many people. I consider religious ethics a fine example of moral training wheels, useful for those too incurious to get into the ethical weeds and just use the fall back position, "because god said so."
Here is the problem. Religions do not all propagate the same values in the same ratio. A jaine places a higher value on the life of animals than a typical Abrahamic religion. And while values can be adopted and discarded by different religions, some religions hold certain more destructive values in a higher concentration. Ann was talking about the greater propensity in Muslim societies to tie religious laws to the state. Virtually all of the theocracies are islamic. Now one can make the case that Christianity had the same issue in the past, but the key word is

Question for Bob: Using your knowledge of evolutionary psycology and religion, why do people of different ethnic groups prefer to marry members of their own religion rather than their own ethnic group as is predicted by evolutionary psycology?

Is that a figurine of Jesus in the background, or am I having a vision?

Bob - I think you need to spend a diavlog or something linking your moral progress theory to your philosophy of moral realism. Without that link, it is too easy to see your theory as just reflecting a preconceived opinion, and your book as just picking facts that support it, rather than deriving from a core underlying moral realism that is evident in the religious texts and/or in the course of history. It would be easy for the so-inclined to argue that your theory provides support for a social structure in which wives are subject to their husbands and in which female empowerment and equality are considered as disruptive to moral progress. It all depends on how you define morality, so it is critical that you define it upfront if you want people to understand your position, especially since the history of religion and the moral progress of religion are hardly examples of how female empowerment and equality are essential to moral order and moral progress. And then, of course, you will need to defend your theory from arguments that your moral philosophy works against moral order and progress as defined by others.

Quoting Toryentalist: Is that a figurine of Jesus in the background, or am I having a vision?

I suspect you are perceiving yourself to be in a non-zero sum relationship with Bob, and are therefore experiencing a new-found appreciation for the deity embraced by the whiggish Occidentalist on your screen.

I don't get why Sanford's behavior (and Michael Jackson's?!) is forgiveable but John Edwards' is not. From the point of view of the victims (wives and children especially) I don't see what the difference is. Am I missing something?

Mark Sanford, my governor. His press conference confessional was candid and yet equivocal. It's not clear which woman he plans to choose. He understands what he needs to do to maintain his position and his family. He knows what WE, the mob of civilized society, expect from him. WE don't care about the "gentle kisses that restore his soul"(from his emails to Maria). WE require his quiet reconciliation with his wife so that his four sons may have the example-setting they deserve. WE want them to see that he can return to and fully inhabit the shell he presented to us. A Good and Passionless Conservative. PASSION is for Liberals...with their wild schemes for giving The Meek a crack at inheriting the Earth before the Rich are done with it. Liberals' hearts are bleeding...they ooze the juice of empathy. It's no surprise when their embrace of humanity turns sexual. But Conservatives have control over their humanity. They guard their wealth and check their emotions. THEY DON'T fall into LOVE, the trap that sets the spirit FREE. They fuck in conquest and return to battle. Governor Mark Sanford isn't r
eading the script of every other Family Values Cheater. He's

I find Bob's belief system as it relates to "God" unconvincing and slightly disturbing. I find his belief in Ann Althouse mystifying and revolting.

Quoting thprop: His view is as narcissistic as the religious.

True. The question that I have for Bob is: "what do we do about it?" If there is a higher power that lends a moral progression to history, well, what do we do about that? And the answer, of course, is: help it along. Play our part in the progression. How would one do that? By convincing the unconvinced to get with the program--by writing books and running websites, perhaps. God wants Bob to do what Bob likes doing and is already doing. Huh.

Quoting JonIrenicus: Some people simply see certain actors in the world like a cancer and want to cut it out.

Simply!!!

Bob declares that the promotion of Atheism serves the purposes of The Right Wing Hawks. To which Ann responds, "So it's Atheism for Obamans." Ann, do you think of Obama as a Right Wing Hawk......or were you just overeager to connect 'Obama and Atheism'?

Bob and Ann briefly discussed the mysterious Mark Sanford line, "the biggest self of self is indeed self." I have heard speculation that it is codeword of some sort that would have meaning to those who follow the weird sort of Christianism practiced by The Family/The Fellowship -- that DC cult that he and many other GOP politicians are involved with. Anyway, Language Log does not mention this possibility, but has a number of other guess, for those interested. It's worth checking out just to see the LOLcat they swiped from Scalzi.

Quoting bjkeefe: Bob and Ann briefly discussed the mysterious Mark Sanford line, "the biggest self of self is indeed self." I have heard speculation that it is codeword of some sort that would have meaning to those who follow the weird sort of Christianism practiced by The Family/The Fellowship -- that DC cult that he and many other GOP politicians are involved with.

Anyway, Language Log does not mention this possibility, but has a number of other guess, for those interested. It's worth checking out just to see the LOLcat they swiped from Scalzi.

I am surprised that with all the Sanford stuff in the news no one has mentioned Jeff Sharlet's book The Family. As described in the book Sanford's spiritual practices don't look like any Christianity I have ever seen.

Wait, young what-what?

Quoting ohcomeon: I am surprised that with all the Sanford stuff in the news no one has mentioned Jeff Sharlet's book The Family. As described in the book Sanford's spiritual practices don't look like any Christianity I have ever seen.

http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/11164

Joel - Thanks! I missed that one. Can't wait to watch it.

Quoting ohcomeon: I am surprised that with all the Sanford stuff in the news no one has mentioned Jeff Sharlet's book The Family.

Actually ... ;^)

Quoting bjkeefe: Actually ...

;^)

You're always ahead of the curve, BJ.

Quoting ohcomeon: You're always ahead of the curve, BJ.

Actually, I'm always a little worried about how tinfoil-y my hat is when it comes to The Family. In any case, that's a good diavlog that Joel pointed out. Well worth following the sidebar links, too, if for no other reason than to get a thrill like going to a horror movie.

Quoting osmium: Wait, young what-what?

Heh. I remember the claim going around back when that poster was on every schoolboy's wall that the reason it was so popular was that among the curls in Farrah's hair were an S, an E, and an X. (Yes, kids, we used to attribute magical powers to subliminal messages, even in the face of more obvious explanations.)

ImprecisePsychic said: "Bob declares that the promotion of Atheism serves the purposes of The Right Wing Hawks. To which Ann responds, 'So it's Atheism for Obamans.' Ann, do you think of Obama as a Right Wing Hawk......or were you just overeager to connect 'Obama and Atheism'?" My statement is directed at Bob. If I were being less elliptical, I might have said: "So then, Bob, your atheism is Atheism for Obamans, isn't it?" Bob is different from Hitchens on foreign policy, but Bob, like Hitchens, is arguing from what I think is a position of atheism. Hitchens is hostile toward religion, and Bob is kindly and inclusive (of the parts of religion that are peace-loving and moderate). As I say in the diavlog, it's a good-cop-bad-cop routine. By the way, I do think Obama is an atheist, don't you?

please just get Sam Harris on bhtv. He is well versed, polite, and extremely informing. All this spiritual god talk is making me sore

I thought Sanford showed superior verbal ability at his press conference. He demonstrated national political leadership by taking on Obama and Clyburn and refusing the stimulus money for his state. I think republicans have to secede from the federal system. Of all the national republican figures, Sanford was the one I saw as closest to that POV. A setback for our not yet nascent breakaway republic. -Steve

Quoting DenvilleSteve: He demonstrated national political leadership by taking on Obama and Clyburn and refusing the stimulus money for his state.

Unfortunately for his constituents, his job is to provide state political leadership. Good thing for them that his job is mostly a figurehead one.

By the way, I do think Obama is an atheist, don't you?

I can't see into the man's heart but I'm fairly certain he doesn't adhere to the 'cling' sort of belief he ascribes to anyone rural and conservative. Interesting wasn't it that he could describe these people as 'bitter' and yet cite the most supreme - whoops - Rev Wright as his spiritual lighthouse.

Quoting harkin: Interesting wasn't it that he could ...

Interesting to you and Jack Cashill, I suppose.

Quoting bjkeefe: Unfortunately for his constituents, his job is to provide state political leadership.

Good thing for them that his job is mostly a figurehead one.

If/when the republicans in the state break away from the feds, they could claim with merit that they have no obligation to assume the Obama mega debt. Their governor refused to take the money the feds borrowed to finance the so called stimulus.

Quoting ohcomeon: I find Bob's belief system as it relates to "God" unconvincing and slightly disturbing. I find his belief in Ann Althouse mystifying and revolting.

What's wrong with agnosticism (on the question of God) - I share that view. And what's wrong with Ann Althouse?

Quoting DenvilleSteve: I thought Sanford showed superior verbal ability at his press conference.

He demonstrated national political leadership by taking on Obama and Clyburn and refusing the stimulus money for his state.

I agree on Sanford's political leadership. His was unmatched among politicians, comparable only to that of radio talk show hosts and conservative justices. No wonder far-left journalists and editors of far-left web sites, such as Bob Wright, would violently disagree with him.
Sanford's fall is a big loss for American conservatism.

Quoting DenvilleSteve: If/when the republicans in the state break away from the feds, they could claim with merit that they have no obligation to assume the Obama mega debt. Their governor refused to take the money the feds borrowed to finance the so called stimulus.

Hmmm. Maybe Obama should say he has no obligation to assume the Regan and Bush mega debts, too. That'll solve everything! Meanwhile, I can't wait for you to leave. But of course you never will. You rightwing wankers are all about that -- just wanking.

NO, Ann, I don't believe that Obama is an atheist. I do believe that The Devil can dwell just under the surface of a late middleaged vixen with a pixie bob. 'The Devil'? Maybe not; just someone who argues insincerely, who giggles out her accusations.....and then diverts attention ever so elliptically.

Quoting JoeK: I agree on Sanford's political leadership. His was unmatched among politicians, comparable only to that of radio talk show hosts and conservative justices. No wonder far-left journalists and editors of far-left web sites, such as Bob Wright, would violently disagree with him.
Sanford's fall is a big loss for American conservatism.

He honored his pledge to leave the congress after 6 years. I dont like it that media republicans are throwing the man under the bus. Bunch of federalist bastards.

Quoting ImprecisePsychic: 'The Devil'? Maybe not; just someone who argues insincerely, who giggles out her accusations.....and then diverts attention ever so elliptically.

What the hell are you talking about? Shouldn't you be a little bit embarrassed you didn't get what everybody else understood, that Ann was talking of Bob?

Quoting ImprecisePsychic: NO, Ann, I don't believe that Obama is an atheist.

Quoting JoeK: What the hell are you talking about? Shouldn't you be a little bit embarrassed you didn't get what everybody else understood, that Ann was talking of Bob?

Yeah, how could he fail to see that "Bob" is spelled O-b-a-m-a?

Quoting Ann Althouse: By the way, I do think Obama is an atheist, don't you?

Stoopid libtards.

Quoting DenvilleSteve: He honored his pledge to leave the congress after 6 years. I dont like it that media republicans are throwing the man under the bus.

I am not sure how much of his political career is salvageable. I haven't been following media last several days so I am not sure who you are talking about. For a while, neoconish commentators have been unhappy with the Sanford's brand of conservatism gaining influence among Americans.

Quoting DenvilleSteve: Bunch of federalist bastards.

Oh, well. Better than listening to liberal scum, day in and day out on BarackHussein.tv.

Quoting bjkeefe: Yeah, how could he fail to see that "Bob" is spelled O-b-a-m-a?

No, not in the comments. In the diavlog.

Quoting JoeK: No wonder far-left journalists and editors of far-left web sites, such as Bob Wright, would violently disagree with him.

So true. This place is like character assassination central against Sanford, all day, every day. It really shows Bob's true colors the way he obsessively uses BhTV as a platform to smear such an honorable public servant. If I had a dime for each time I had to sit through one of Bob's hollering 10-minute anti-Sanford tirades...

Quoting JoeK: No, not in the comments. In the diavlog.

I think it's clear to everyone (except you) that IP was responding to AA's comment.

Quoting bjkeefe: Hmmm. Maybe Obama should say he has no obligation to assume the Regan and Bush mega debts, too. That'll solve everything!

I would take that deal. Obama is running deficits that are 4x that of Bush.

Quoting bjkeefe: Meanwhile, I can't wait for you to leave. But of course you never will. You rightwing wankers are all about that -- just wanking.

Give the republican people a place to go. Millions would accept and go. Here is an idea - make the urban areas that the Obama admin is planning to raze a federal free zone: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/f...o-survive.html

Quoting DenvilleSteve: I would take that deal. Obama is running deficits that are 4x that of Bush.

Indeed he is. To clean up after Bush and build a better country is not going to be done on the cheap.

Give the republican people a place to go. Millions would accept and go.

Looking for handouts, huh? So much for your self-proclaimed "self reliance."

Quoting bjkeefe: I think it's clear to everyone (except you) that IP was responding to AA's comment.

He should have changed his tone after getting explanation for his not very clever question he asked here:

Bob declares that the promotion of Atheism serves the purposes of The Right Wing Hawks.

To which Ann responds, "So it's Atheism for Obamans."

Ann, do you think of Obama as a Right Wing Hawk......or were you just overeager to connect 'Obama and Atheism'?

Quoting JoeK: He should have changed his tone after getting explanation for his not very clever question he asked here:

You should have acknowledged you were wrong rather than trying to change the subject.

Re. Fawcett and teenage lust, who was your 'inspiration' when you were a teenager, Bob? ;-)

I think Ann was good in this one. She pressed Bob more logically on his premise than just about anyone has so far. (Not harder per se, but down the avenue that concerns me most...ie- his bias which has directed his entire argument.) I think Bob has joined the Church of MLC (mid-life crisis) and is reevaluating everything through the lens that was forced upon him as a child. As much as he revels in the "empirical" nature of what he claims to be observing, there is still that HUGE leap from seeing a pattern, to attributing said pattern to a supernatural agent. Every time I drop something I see a pattern too, it falls toward the earth. Must be the Pink Unicorn causing it. I haven't read the book yet so I can't speak of the "evidence" of moral progress that Bob has laid out, but it seems like some very wise people (Paul Bloom, PZ Myers, Me&theBoys) are less than overwhelmed with the prosecution's case so I'm tentative. In any event, I still maintain that arguing that there is a direction to something therefore there is a God is simply to say that whatever direction we observe = God. If Bob's

Quoting uncle ebeneezer: I think Ann was good in this one. She pressed Bob more logically on his premise than just about anyone has so far.

When Ann Althouse is the voice of fucking reason, you know you've gone through the looking glass and made stew out of the rabbit...in left field...under a full moon. You know what I mean. Ah well. Ann did return to form (pure pettiness) at the end there, with her misleading gloss of that Doug guy's book. "He wants us to go back to the Middle Ages!" Thanks, Ann. Your sanity was fun while it lasted.

I only listened to the first half (God part.) In that case, take my praise and reduce it accordingly ;-)

Quoting Ray: When Ann Althouse is the voice of fucking reason, you know you've gone through the looking glass and made stew out of the rabbit...in left field...under a full moon.

You know what I mean.

Ah well. Ann did return to form (pure pettiness) at the end there, with her misleading gloss of that Doug guy's book. "He wants us to go back to the Middle Ages!" Thanks, Ann. Your sanity was fun while it lasted.

Amen.

Quoting JoeK: I agree on Sanford's political leadership. His was unmatched among politicians, comparable only to that of radio talk show hosts and conservative justices. No wonder far-left journalists and editors of far-left web sites, such as Bob Wright, would violently disagree with him.
Sanford's fall is a big loss for American conservatism.

Not that I agree with you, but it appears that Julian Sanchez (and, via JS) Reihan Salam) do. Goddam far-leftist Bloggingheads.

Ann, I am not sure if you are being "tongue 'n cheek" when you speculated that President Obama is an athiest. I do think his 20 year association with Reverend Wright and Trinity was some kind of ruse. I don't know if he's an atheist but doubt he is the card carrying Christian he purports to be. John

I also think Bob's argument fails. He laid out the same moral direction of the universe thesis in "NonZero," and it was not especially persuasive then. Judging from the review here, he seems to expand the claims in "God," which will make them less persuasive. I don't think it's mid-life crisis, however (after mid-life it's ALL crisis), since Bob has always had a profound and passionate scholarly interest in these themes and in religious thinkers in general. Whoever the idiot was who claimed "Bob is a light weight" should be ashamed of himself. Finally, I will admit with some dismay that I got suckered into watching the first few minutes of this dialogue. I had promised myself NEVER again to watch the bottom three of Bheads: Anne, Mickey and David Frum (in no particular order). Bad Wonderment! No self-discipline.

He did actually use the word "bitter" about Reverend Wright in his race speech, didn't he?

I don't think it's mid-life crisis, however (after mid-life it's ALL crisis), since Bob has always had a profound and passionate scholarly interest in these themes and in religious thinkers in general.

The MLC remark was mainly tongue-in-cheek. I agree with your take on it, actually.

You know, I enjoyed this diavlog. Ann Althouse is seriously growing on me. I'm basically from the same ideological place as her sworn enemies -- those mean feminist liberals about whom the very thought was enough to make her scream at Garance Franke Ruta -- but I'm starting to like her despite myself. I think the key with her is that she really is just messing around. This is probably why her last diavlog with Wright was so horrible, because he's so deadly serious about everything. This one worked, though, maybe because they had something specific to talk about. I do think, though, that she's confusing a particular kind of American mainline Protestantism with all of Christianity when she started talking about how Christianity is about the individual and coming to belief on your own. I don't think this is particularly characteristic of Christianity over other religions or a trait common to all branches of Christianity. There are plenty of places where being a Christian has much more to do with group belonging and ethnic identification. I mean, if you asked a Croat nationalist why they're Catholic and not Orthodox, I can guarantee you they

Ann, how much do the Zionists pay you to fear monger and spout gross generalizations aimed at Islam and Muslims?...just kidding (not really). It seems that Muslims are stuck in a "Damned if you do, damned if you don't" scenario in the west. If we proselytize and stay vocal, we are trying to take over and dominate; if we "play nice", then we are only faining loyalty until we take over and dominate. It's a ridiculous and shameless assertion that is neither backed by practical or textual evidence. However, you're deranged and xenophobic views do have some merit when they are examined within a Judaic context. The Old Testament and especially the Talmud is replete with this type of intolerant, anti-freedom, anti-heathen jargon. You however, are very careful to steer the conversation away and to concentrate entirely on Islam...deflection makes a pitiful argument. Anyways, this turning Muslims against Christians approach isn't going to go very far, people are far too intelligent for that...keep deflecting though

Quoting Ann Althouse: By the way, I do think Obama is an atheist, don't you?

We have only two options: 1) Look into his soul
2) Stick with the observables

Bob, exactly what kind of god are we supposed to be agnostic on? We have a much stronger scientific understanding of the universe than is often admitted in religious discussions. We understand the biology of making babies and that we were not created by god, but by the union of our parents' gametes. (We can do the DNA tests to prove it.) We have the fossil evidence to demonstrate the fact of evolution and we understand the irrefutable logic of natural selection that makes it possible. Using Einstein's equations, we can estimate that the total of mass and energy in the universe sums to zero, which (if we are correct) precludes any independent force acting to cause the big bang. Cognitive neuroscience has discredited dualism, and we know that the mind is a product of the brain, not of a disembodied eternal soul (and, of course, the fact that none of us can remember anything that happened before our brains existed). We understand that hurricanes and tornadoes are caused by weather patterns rather than by homosexuality or some other nonsense cause. Belief or unbelief has been demonstrated to have

do you have free will? or was your typing of that message predestined at the big bang?

Ann, I'm with you. My gut tells me he's a non-believer just like Karl Rove. Everything about him screams fake Christian. At the very least, if he is a believer, he's not a very serious one, I think. However, until he tells us otherwise... I will continue to point out that he has the same religious beliefs as Sarah Palin.

Shorter Lial:

Obama is a Communist! And a Fascist! He's just like Chamberlain! And Hitler!

When will wingnuts learn that mud hurled from equal and opposite extremes cancels itself out?

Which answer proves agnosticism?

I haven't read the book and just started the diavlog but I have been enjoying the fireworks around the comment section. I don't harbor interest in a divine purpose myself but it isn't particularly odd to hypothesize that there might be a trajectory to the reality that we all share. Not with a particular purpose or plan, anymore than the parabola described by a baseball. I enjoyed Non-Zero was not bothered by the meta-physical tones. I chose to take it in as a slight bent to the way biological systems interact with other biological systems. Call it the 51% doctrine. You adjust your interests so that you get some arbitrary percentage (eg. 1%) of what you want, over 50% and still make it profitable for both systems. Can't say that a small vector of progress in the aggregate of all life, a vector that tends toward more complex and creative systems is really that big of a deal. Now maybe bob is saying that there is an intelligence behind it all or what-have-you and any reasonable criticism ( doesn't even have to be constructive ) is more than appreciated by me as

It may or may not be a higher power at work but I think it's cool. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_the_SubGenius X-days is coming soon people.

An interview with Obama about faith from 2004: http://blog.beliefnet.com/stevenwald...-cathleen.html I'd say Obama hits the sweet spot for a pluralistic nation of believers. We're lucky to have him.

i was just figuring you haven't thought much about the consequences of the ideas you posted earlier. which is proved pretty well by your non-answer.

Quoting thouartgob: I don't harbor interest in a divine purpose myself but it isn't particularly odd to hypothesize that there might be a trajectory to the reality that we all share. Not with a particular purpose or plan, anymore than the parabola described by a baseball.

That's the puzzle with Bob. He goes out of the way to use the word "purpose" (especially the phrase "some larger purpose") and then denies that he means anything that the word means.

The issue of free will seems kind of tangential to me. I have my opinions about it, but however you answer it, it doesn't seem to have a strong implication on the correctness of the agnostic viewpoint.

By the way, I do think Obama is an atheist, don't you?

Well, since you think Bob is an atheist after he has shouted from the rooftops that he is not, I'm not surprised you attribute atheism to Obama -- a self-proclaimed devout Christian -- as well. Your rather insulting implication is that both Bob and Obama are liars. It's true that many liberal intellectuals would like to dismiss Obama's religiousity as mere opportunistic lip service, i.e., a pander to millions of Biblical Americans who would refuse to vote for a "non-believer." I too would be tempted to ask Barack tête-à-tête, "Surely you can't believe in Jesus as the resurrected son of God?" But I'm afraid the answer is, "Yes, I do." He's also surrounded by Theists. Hillary, Biden, the prayerful Senate and House. Are there any "out" atheists in the Cabinet? My bet is no, although I'd be pleasantly surprised by some evidence to the contrary.

The moonwalk dance was really exciting, but to me it seems obvious that he lip sinched the whole thing.

Quoting Me&theboys: This gets the prize for best diavlog title (although I think it should only have one "d"). Maybe that would be better than the current "Percontations".

Also, "Lollapalooza" should only have one "l"...

You mean Loapaooza? ;-)

He teared up when talking about his friends because it's likely they were the most sympathetic to him, and he could cry to them.

Quoting thouartgob: It may or may not be a higher power at work but I think it's cool.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_the_SubGenius

X-days is coming soon people.

Yeah, that amazed me, too, given how often he doesn't seem to get pop culture references. Probably he got a lot of email about it, due to the "Bob" aspect. OTOH, I see that it's been around since forever, so maybe ... (I never heard of this until life online began.)

Kudos to Ann for suggesting that many practicing Christians and Muslims put getting to an afterlife far ahead of the various foreign policy goals important to policy wonks like Bob . . . this is certainly my recollection of being raised a practicing Catholic, and presumably also Bob's in being raised Baptist . . . I'm now also a foreign policy wonk but I think the simplest explanation for that is that I no longer believe all the stuff about heaven that I was told in church and parochial school . . . similarly, I think the simplest explanation for why Swedes are off the charts in their concern about Bob's earthly agenda is that, like Bob and I, they've stopped caring about all the heaven and hell stuff that we were once told to care about by religious authorities . . . .

Quoting thprop: I am an atheist - I do not believe in a god. Further, I am a strong atheist. I believe there is no god. I never say for certain there is no god. I would not say for certain that there are no 4,000 cats at the center of the sun. I can assign a probability to those hypotheses. I would say both are significantly less than .0001%.

Can't you go even further? If even one cat spontaneously appeared at the center of the sun, it wouldn't be there for long. Plus, if it was going to reproduce it would need another cat of the opposite gender. Plus, the first cat could not appear there in the first place because the chemistry at the center of the sun is different from the chemistry of a cat. We know that it cannot be the case that there are 4,000 cats at the center of the sun unless everything we count as knowledge about the universe is incorrect. I think the analogy is good to claims about god. You can believe in a god, provided that it's the case that experiment and observation systematically lead us to wrong knowledge at every level.

Why not!?

Quoting Lyle: Ann,

I'm with you. My gut tells me he's a non-believer just like Karl Rove. Everything about him screams fake Christian. At the very least, if he is a believer, he's not a very serious one, I think.

However, until he tells us otherwise... I will continue to point out that he has the same religious beliefs as Sarah Palin.

I also suspect Obama's a non-believer, and it's worth remembering that, IIRC, Americans' say they'd be even less likely to vote for an atheist for president than for a Muslim . . . if present progressive trends continue (e.g., increasing atheism among the young Americans who also most support Bob's policy goals) then I don''t think there's anything to worry about, but if he's going to be PC then I guess I do think Bob should be careful not to contribute to the atheists as a privileged "pariah class" stuff (aka, atheists as the new Jews).

Governor Sanford seemed perfectly normal in his reaction to what he'd apparently been going through.
I would fully sympathize if he hadn't apparently been so self-righteous about other people's sex lives.
If religious Republicans would stop being so self-righteous about other people, I'd be willing to forgive their normal reactions to extreme sexual excitement.

Quoting Markos: If religious Republicans would stop being so self-righteous about other people, I'd be willing to forgive their normal reactions to extreme sexual excitement.

If self-righteousness stopped, what would be the point of being a religious republican ??

Quoting bjkeefe: Yeah, that amazed me, too, given how often he doesn't seem to get pop culture references. Probably he got a lot of email about it, due to the "Bob" aspect.

OTOH, I see that it's been around since forever, so maybe ... (I never heard of this until life online began.)

With all of the celebrity carnage ( billy mays fer god's sake ), iran riots, LUV GUV all happening in the same time frame ?? What can be next. Kaus learns spanish and shacks up with Sanfords curvy mistress. That sub-genius saucer might just show up after all. ps. Coleman concedes as well. Still convinced there is nothing out there !!!!! :-O

Quoting uncle ebeneezer: You mean Loapaooza? ;-)

You are very witty tonite!

Quoting Magic Flea: Also, "Lollapalooza" should only have one "l"...

What's a lolla, or a lola? :-)

Quoting Wonderment: Finally, I will admit with some dismay that I got suckered into watching the first few minutes of this dialogue. I had promised myself NEVER again to watch the bottom three of Bheads: Anne, Mickey and David Frum (in no particular order). Bad Wonderment! No self-discipline.

Bob and Ann interacted quite well in this diavlog. Even when I may disagree with Ann rather often, I appreciate her style of interaction much more now than in the past. This comment should not be construed as support for your lack of discipline though.

Let's bring this back to America. If the deeds of religion are largely contingent upon what is actually happening on the ground, how would one explain the diversity of opinion on abortion and gay rights in America? That is, what is "happening on the ground" that would encourage (primarily) fundamentalist and evangelicals to vehemently oppose these two issues? Is there *any reason whatsoever* beyond a religious one to lead to the intensity of anti-abortion and anti-gay feelings among these people? Would it not be fair to say that minus a strictly religiously dogmatic reason, there would be much less opposition to abortion and very little to gay rights?

Haha... that makes no sense.

Bob made two great points: (1) Atheism (as it commonly understood) is wrong: http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/207...1:15&out=12:15 (2) And Religion is not a source of a lot of bad in the world: http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/207...9:55&out=11:00

Quoting Lyle: Haha... that makes no sense.

I didn't expect you to get it. I'm sure everyone I care about did, though.

It almost seems unfair to beat up on Ann for her blatant ignorance about Islam and Muslims. I'll give her pass on that and simply ask she broaden her reading beyond the usual orientalists. What astounds me more is that a law professor thinks the first amendment stipulate separation of church from state. I'm not a lawyer but I know the difference between "separation" and (non) establishment.

I think Tyler Cowen is right to follow Plato's Euthyphro argument: Good and bad, right and wrong, cannot be what they are just because God declares them to be thus. To have authority over us (not merely power), God must himself be good. The legitimacy of commands is dependent on their moral rightness. The standards of right and wrong cannot be dependent on God -- on whether he exists or not, or whether he commands this or that. If God exists, we should trust him because he knows what is antecedently good, not because he arbitrarily determines what is good. I wish Bob were a bit more familiar with this point. Even though he takes a very attenuated view of "God", he almost seems to assume that God (in whatever minimal sense) would be the source of the moral standards themselves.
The role God plays (in a religion that accepts the Euthyphro argument) is to account, not for the standards, but for the good that actually exists in the world -- or rather to assure us that the standards are (or will be) fulfilled in the actual universe: Not only is it RIGHT that good people

Inside progressive jokes void of knowledge and intelligence. Typical.

Separation of church and state is the colloquial phrase, i.e., it means the non-establishment clause. Ann knows.

Quoting Lyle: Inside progressive jokes void of knowledge and intelligence. Typical.

No, Lial, it isn't an inside joke, nor does it require an ideological affiliation. All it takes to get it is an awareness of political memes from the past six months and a dash of reading comprehension.

Blah, blah, blah... you're partisanship is boring.

Quoting Lyle: Blah, blah, blah... you're partisanship is boring.

At least it's spelled correctly.

Ann should educate herself a little about Shar'iah before spouting off. I would recommend Abdullahi A. An-Na'im's book Islam and the Secular State: The Future of Shari'a. He is a law professor at Emory Univ.

"What astounds me more is that a law professor thinks the first amendment stipulate separation of church from state. I'm not a lawyer but I know the difference between "separation" and (non) establishment." Well, among a dozen other things, I don't even mention the First Amendment in this diavlog. The separation of religion and state is an important principle quite apart from what is in the U.S. Constitution. I'll stop there and see if you have the decency to apologize. Or perhaps you will take the occasion to call me a devil, like the last person in this thread to whom I took the trouble to respond.

Quoting Ann Althouse: "What astounds me more is that a law professor thinks the first amendment stipulate separation of church from state. I'm not a lawyer but I know the difference between "separation" and (non) establishment."

Well, among a dozen other things, I don't even mention the First Amendment in this diavlog. The separation of religion and state is an important principle quite apart from what is in the U.S. Constitution. I'll stop there and see if you have the decency to apologize. Or perhaps you will take the occasion to call me a devil, like the last person in this thread to whom I took the trouble to respond.

Yes, you're right, you didn't mention the 1st Amendment. And therein lies another problem. The fact that you juxtaposed this metaphor alongside your Islamophobia suggests to me you're not just interested in separating religion from state but separating it from public life. You know, just to be on the safe side.

Haha... "your". My grammar is atrocious, nothing new there.

Quoting grits-n-gravy: Ann should educate herself a little about Shar'iah before spouting off. I would recommend Abdullahi A. An-Na'im's book Islam and the Secular State: The Future of Shari'a. He is a law professor at Emory Univ.

If it's supposedly worth reading the book, perhaps you can give explain why -- what points does it make, why are they valuable, so on. I might be interested, if given more than a title. I'm not sure what you are going on about re "separation of church and state," though. That's an entirely normal way of putting it, and Ann is hardly the only lawyer or law professor to do so. (As already addressed.) I gather that you are trying to make some kind of argument that making sharia the law is not inconsistent with the 1st amendment? If so, and if it's based on some argument that separation of church and state is not required, I'm skeptical, but am willing to hear the argument. (There obviously are ways to observe sharia which don't demand that it be state law. I've dealt with, for example, a situation where an investment vehicle was structured to comply with sharia law, and in that kind of

Quoting Ann Althouse: [...] The separation of religion and state is an important principle quite apart from what is in the U.S. Constitution. I'll stop there and see if you have the decency to apologize. Or perhaps you will take the occasion to call me a devil, like the last person in this thread to whom I took the trouble to respond.

You might get more civil responses if your instinct wasn't always to demand apologies every time someone disagrees with you. Even if you feel you have misunderstood or had your earlier remarks misrepresented, perpetually acting personally slighted right out of the gate probably isn't going to get you anything but an equally irritated response. Of course, I know you're not usually in the mood to discuss things calmly, but would rather pick fights, so the above probably won't serve as anything except another excuse for you to take offense.

What does providing a civil response have anything to do with what someone else writes?

Quoting Lyle: What does providing a civil response have anything to do with what someone else writes?

Reading comprehension: You should learn some.

Haha... you of all people accusing someone of a lack of reading comprehension. And preaching about the virtue of civil responses... haha.

Quoting Bloggin' Noggin: How well do Bob's materialism and his version of the World Spirit go together? I'm not sure, but it's an interesting project to fit them together, and I would say, by no means, the work of a mere "lightweight."

Bloggin Noggin you are SO remarkably acute....sometimes. That is exactly the question I asked myself. I wonder if Bob has asked himself.

Quoting Lyle: [...]

Same answer (last paragraph).

I by no means am saying this in a spirit of divisiveness, as I do not necessarily disagree with everything you say, but you should either seek tutoring or read more to improve your reading comprehension. I would guess your reading comprehension would be found to be equivalent of an average 7th or 8th grader's. Of course, I do not know your age, and if you are that young or younger, then there is no problem. Edit:
try not to take offense, my own verbal/linguistic skills would probably be found lacking as well.

Real mature Starwatcher. Very adult comments. Do people have to respond point for point to what people write? I don't think so. Do people have to respond in an uncivil manner just because someone makes an uncivil comment?

How would one go about harmonizing materialism and a belief in a supernatural power? Isn't the idea that everything can be explained via physical entities/processes one of the core tenets of materialism? I could see how his moral directionality could be harmonized, as that is really just saying natural selection can operate at the societal level, but I have no idea how one could even begin with the supernatural parts of his reasoning.

Michael Jackson was a pop singer. Frank Sinatra, for one, was a popular singer. Robert Hughes, of all people, wrote on the limits of pop as vocal art: smooth accessible, generic, unthreatening, pleasant and, hey, if it's got a beat, you can dance to it--in other words, the cross over essence of Motown (which is interesting to contrast with the rougher, more compelling Stax, and Atlantic R n' B). It's the difference, say, between Billie Holiday and Diana Ross. Hughes compared the confections of Motown to Muddy Waters, the latter rough, powerful, disturbing and inherently artistic. So Michael Jackson was flash and glitter as pleasant and fun as it comes, and he really could dance, and he had moments whern there seemed some truly artistic there there, like his performance on Motown's 25th Anniversary show, which just blew me away. But finally, at his best he was the paradox of the ephemeral as transcendent. In his personal life after Thriller he became a drug addled, narcissistic pederast who burned through millions of dollars settling child molestation cases, and became outsized, cringe inducing freak continuous with Octo Mom and that ilk, personifying what is so degeneratingly crazy in America, a country I love, though not of. p.s. Listen to Sinatra on Summer Wind, or

Quoting stephanie: If it's supposedly worth reading the book, perhaps you can give explain why -- what points does it make, why are they valuable, so on. I might be interested, if given more than a title . . .

At the risk of "going on" let me address a couple of your points. First, the main point Abdullahi makes is that there needs to be an institutional separation of Islam from the state and that this separation has been the norm rather than exception throughout most of Muslim history. That doesn't mean that shari'a principles cannot be a source of state law nor does it mean shari'a principles MUST be the source of state law. And second, I guess you can say I was making a counterargument about shari'a and the first amendment. Ann has this delusion that Muslims are just biding time until the day they can coerce non-Muslims into being Muslims or at least impose shari'a. (She's probably been exposed to Patricia Crone writings). Abdullahi's argument, and the facts on the ground, refutes the notion that Islam is inherently hostile to freedom of religion.

Interesting analysis Basman, I forgot about Sinatra as a comparison. I think Stevie Wonder is an even better comparison because of the time-period, similarity of genre, etc., and to my mind it ain't even close. Stevie by a mile!! That said, Frank by a mile too. And when people used to compare MJ to Elvis or the Beatles...I mean, come on. (come together, rather.) Maybe Elvis, but the Beatles!!! The Beatles didn't buy MJ's catalog, it was the other way around. I think that pretty much says it all. I would agree about your test case if I hadn't been subjected (as a sometimes professional musician) to playing Ain't No Sunshine (and Use Me, as well) so many times that my insides cringe at the mere thought of playing them again. But generally, I agree with the point. And yes, where is our Ricci diavlog. Emily Bazelon did a great exhaustive account of the whole story. Maybe her and Jack Balkin, or two legal types. Let's hear it.

Ann isn't being delusional about the fact that certain Muslims are biding their time to see that Islam and sharia become the way of the world. There are in fact certain Muslims who think this way. I don't believe she said that all Muslims or even a plurality of Muslims think this.

Quoting Lyle: Ann isn't being delusional about the fact that certain Muslims are biding their time to see that Islam and sharia become the way of the world. There are in fact certain Muslims who think this way.

I don't believe she said that all Muslims or even a plurality of Muslims think this.

I see this lunacy is starting to spread. Let's hope it doesn't become a pandemic.

uncle ebeneezer I agree with everything you say esepcially including the superiority of the wonderful Stevie Wonder. The way I talked with someone about Billie Jean as pop music and mature vocal art as popular music is the the former makes you want to get up and dance, which is great of course, but the latter compels you to sit and listen and pay close attention. Itzik Basman

In his personal life after Thriller he became a drug addled, narcissistic pederast...

Alleged pederast. Acquitted by jury of his peers. Admitted to nothing in settlement of civil allegations.

Quoting basman: Michael Jackson was a pop singer. Frank Sinatra, for one, was a popular singer. Robert Hughes, of all people, wrote on the limits of pop as vocal art: smooth accessible, generic, unthreatening, pleasant and, hey, if it's got a beat, you can dance to it--in other words, the cross over essence of Motown (which is interesting to contrast with the rougher, more compelling Stax, and Atlantic R n' B). It's the difference, say, between Billie Holiday and Diana Ross. Hughes compared the confections of Motown to Muddy Waters, the latter rough, powerful, disturbing and inherently artistic. So Michael Jackson was flash and glitter as pleasant and fun as it comes, and he really could dance, and he had moments whern there seemed some truly artistic there there, like his performance on Motown's 25th Anniversary show, which just blew me away. But finally, at his best he was the paradox of the ephemeral as transcendent.

Stax vs Motown! How could you choose? OK, if I had to pick, it'd be Stax. Have you listened to MJ's lyrics? Sure, his image with pop, but his lyrics were often plenty dark and disturbing. He was obviously trying to hard ("Bad," "Dangerous," the glam military look, etc) but he was a real creepy dude. The thing you gotta understand is that was

Quoting grits-n-gravy: the main point Abdullahi makes is that there needs to be an institutional separation of Islam from the state and that this separation has been the norm rather than exception throughout most of Muslim history.

So far, good, and I tend to agree about the historical point, though I'd want to think through the question more and look at the evidence.

Quoting grits-n-gravy: That doesn't mean that shari'a principles cannot be a source of state law nor does it mean shari'a principles MUST be the source of state law.

Here, of course, it all depends on what you mean by that. To return to US Constitutional law for a second, there's nothing prohibiting Americans to pass a particular law motivated, in part, by religious considerations (i.e., I can vote against the death penalty because I think it is immoral). If that's all you are saying, fine. But I'm not at all sure what you are saying, and admit that in part I'm a bit suspicious because this all started with you attacking the use of the phrase "separation of church and state" which I've only previously seen from fundamentalist sorts with a very different interpretation

So you discount the words of Osama bin Laden and cohorts? You discount the words of imams in England who talk about raising the green flag of Islam over Parliament? These guys are a minority, that's for sure, but they exist. Pretending they don't is ignorant. 9/11, it actually happened.

Quoting Wonderment: Alleged pederast.

Acquitted by jury of his peers. Admitted to nothing in settlement of civil allegations.

I have no idea why you're picking this spot to stand on principle, but I have to say, first, he freely -- no, happily -- admitted sleeping with young boys (see also). I would say, second, that legal admissions or not, no one pays $15 million in hush money in response to personal accusations for which there is no basis, or more cynically, are unlikely to be provable. A few thousand to make a nuisance go away, maybe, but not $15 million. Not even a billionaire. If nothing else, his lawyers would put a stop to it, just in the interest of preventing a feeding frenzy by every shark on the planet.

Quoting claymisher: Lou Reed was working out of the doo-wop tradition. He has nothing to do with Sinatra.

Yeah. That claim was whacked.

Quoting Wonderment: Alleged pederast.

Acquitted by jury of his peers. Admitted to nothing in settlement of civil allegations.

He paid $20,000,000.00 in one settlemtn and millions in others: why again? O J was acquitted too. What did that tell us? Itzik Basman

claymisher: Thanks for your comments. To some extent we are arguing over taste, but that said: People of course still sing softly and can be heard. M.J., some of whose lyrics I have pondered, as great as he was, and he was, will artistically live and die by, I argue, by the limits of pop. Sinatra didn’t imitate Crosby but he was influenced by him and was distinct by the time of his mature style. Sintra more than he did Crosby revered Billie Holiday, another brilliant phraser. Bluster and schmaltz in Sinatra’s best, most enduring work, I wouldn’t think so. I don’t listen to Crosby, find nothing compelling in his singing. But I always come back to Sinatra and just marvel at how good he is. I have a lot of time for Mel Torme and Nat King Cole, but for me they don’t have Sinatra’s emotional depth, his ability impeccably to set a scene, paint a picture, create a mood and tell a story. Lou Reed working out of the doo wop tradition: I think I missed that class. (I never claimed that Reed anything to do with Sinatra, just to be clear.) Itzik Basman

Quoting basman: claymisher:

Thanks for your comments. To some extent we are arguing over taste, but that said:

People of course still sing softly and can be heard.

M.J., some of whose lyrics I have pondered, as great as he was, and he was, will artisically live and die by, I argue, by the limits of pop.

Sinatra didn’t imitate Crosby but he was influenced by him and was distinct by the time of his mature style. Sintra more than he did Crosby revered Billie Holiday, another brilliant phraser. Bluster and schmaltz in Sinatra’s best, most enduring work, I wouldn’t think so. I don’t listen to Crosby, find nothing compelling in his singing. But I always come back to Sinatra and just marvel at how good he is. I have a lot of time for Mel Torme and Nat King Cole, but for me they don’t have Sinatra’s emotional depth, his ability impeccably to set a scene, paint a picture, create a mood and tell a story.

Lou Reed working out of the doo wop tradition: I think I missed that class.

(I never claimed that Reed anything to do with Sinatra, just to be clear.)

It's true! Lou Reed wrote doo-wop songs before the VU. You can really hear it in a

I have no idea why you're picking this spot to stand on principle..

No special reason. I just am uncomfortable with the presumption of guilt. I might not extend such benefit of the doubt to political figures, like alleged mass murderer and torturer, GW Bush, but I think musicians and other celebrities should get the benefit of a reasonable doubt. I have no doubt that Jackson was a very weird guy, but I do have some doubts that he was a criminal child molester. If I had to bet I'd say yes, but people's reputations deserve a higher standard of respect than an odds-on bet.

Pre-VU Lou Reed: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbYd0G0Iz3I

Quoting Wonderment: No special reason. I just am uncomfortable with the presumption of guilt.

I might not extend such benefit of the doubt to political figures, like alleged mass murderer and torturer, GW Bush, but I think musicians and other celebrities should get the benefit of a reasonable doubt.

An odd double standard? Or are you just more convinced in your own mind about the former (specifically) as opposed to the latter in general?

I have no doubt that Jackson was a very weird guy, but I do have some doubts that he was a criminal child molester. If I had to bet I'd say yes, but people's reputations deserve a higher standard of respect than an odds-on bet.

In the abstract, I admire your sentiment, and I would often be inclined to agree with you. In this case, though, I think it is obvious what happened. Actually, as far as reputation goes, he had little to lose in my mind. Even before the child molestation accusations started leaking out, I had written him off as a Howard Hughes case -- surrounded himself with yes-men and leeches and remoras, asked only that they all indulge his whims, suffered no one who tried to tell him he was getting stranger

Quoting Starwatcher162536: How would one go about harmonizing materialism and a belief in a supernatural power? Isn't the idea that everything can be explained via physical entities/processes one of the core tenets of materialism?

I could see how his moral directionality could be harmonized, as that is really just saying natural selection can operate at the societal level, but I have no idea how one could even begin with the supernatural parts of his reasoning.

Well, what do you mean by "supernatural"? To speak of the supernatural is almost automatically to imply a kind of dualism -- there are the forces of nature and then there are the forces of the supernatural "realm".
Bob's "God" would apparently not be a "transcendent" God who stands outside nature, but rather a God "immanent" in nature. Spinoza speaks of "Deus sive Natura" -- "God or Nature". When you think of this one thing, God-or-Nature under one attribute, you are thinking of it as Nature, and if you think of that same thing under a different attribute, you are thinking of it as God. Bob's God is a natural God, not a supernatural God -- or that's my interpretation of what I've

Quoting bjkeefe: An odd double standard? Or are you just more convinced in your own mind about the former (specifically) as opposed to the latter in general?

I don't know. I think political speech deserves more leeway. First, there's the question of rhetoric. If I call Cheney a murderer or a fascist, I may not be asking to be taken literally. Second, political leaders often cheat by hiding their misdeeds behind a cloak of national security, emergency powers, executive privilege, etc. Also, compare the following. Suppose we had in the VP debates of 2004 a statement from John Edwards: "You and Bush have violated the Geneva Conventions and committed torture." First of all, it would be ridiculous if Cheney responded, "Allegedly." (Perhaps not as ridiculous as "So?" but nonetheless ridiculous.) Second, we would expect Cheney to offer a defense that included facts, interpretations of torture, etc. But if Cheney had said to Edwards, "I hear you fool around on your wife and consume marijuana" we would have entirely rejected the charges, independently of the facts of the matter. Most people would not expect Edwards to dignify the accusation with an answer, even if rumors were flying about his cheating and pot smoking. Why? Because political speech and political allegations are different from private

Quoting Wonderment: [...]

I guess I sorta buy that. I can see where you're coming from, anyway.

Here, of course, it all depends on what you mean by that. To return to US Constitutional law for a second, there's nothing prohibiting Americans to pass a particular law motivated, in part, by religious considerations (i.e., I can vote against the death penalty because I think it is immoral). If that's all you are saying, fine.

That's part of what I'm saying. The broader, more important point I was making is that there's much flexibility and diversity in how shari'a and secular state law might interrelate in a given society.

Quoting grits-n-gravy: That's part of what I'm saying. The broader, more important point I was making is that there's much flexibility and diversity in how shari'a and secular state law might interrelate in a given society.

We may not actually disagree on this; I can't tell yet. But again what raised red flags for me is that you prefaced your comments with an attack on the phrase "separation of church and state," so it sounds as if you are arguing for some kind of interaction that is different than what we currently have (as despite the absence of those precise words in the 1st Amendment itself, "separation of church and state" is a commonly used and accurate descriptor). So is that what you are saying and, if so, what would be the sorts of ways you are talking about? I've got some ideas about what you might be getting at, but probably should just let you say.

I would add this thought experiment: how many adult men are you aware of that like to sleep with 12 year old boys and are NOT assumed pedophiles?

Quoting stephanie: We may not actually disagree on this; I can't tell yet. But again what raised red flags for me is that you prefaced your comments with an attack on the phrase "separation of church and state," so it sounds as if you are arguing for some kind of interaction that is different than what we currently have (as despite the absence of those precise words in the 1st Amendment itself, "separation of church and state" is a commonly used and accurate descriptor).

So is that what you are saying and, if so, what would be the sorts of ways you are talking about? I've got some ideas about what you might be getting at, but probably should just let you say.

I've already alluded to what I intended by my derision of the use of a metaphor for a literal interpretation of the First Amendment non-establishment clause. What I said was Ann really is interested in separating religion from all levels of public life, not the Jeffersonian wall of separation which was strictly a matter of federalism-i.e. the wall separates religion and the federal government only. Ann is

claymisher, thanks for the link for I Found A Reason and even more thanks for opening up for me a side of Lou Reed I never would have expected. I Found A Reason was interesting though I didn't love it. I couldn't find online from a quick look anything about its history. I'm suspecting it's neo doo wop with Reed both playing somewhat ironically and somewhat sweetly reverently with the doo wop form and tradition. I can't see him ever taking teen age harmonies completely seriously and without an ironic edge. He's too hip and cool. Though I did just read, prompted by the tune, that he started off in a doo wop group called The Shades. I'm willing to speculate they were no Dion and the Belmonts in the sense of being much more self conscious and playful about what they were doing, but I don't know. I would have bet the farm that Lou Reed and doo wop were always oceans apart and here I just learn the opposite. Go know, and, one more cliche, live and learn, I suppose. Itzik Basman

claymisher: I owe you one A propos not much at all here is fantastic neo, neo doo wop: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qv_13KYF6ss Itzik Basman Sorry I couldn't find a purer version online from a quick look see.

Quoting basman: Michael Jackson was a pop singer. Frank Sinatra, for one, was a popular singer.

The view from a hundred years out probably isn't going to make that distinction. The both of them relied on image creation as much as music creation for their careers, and both had embarrassing artistic missteps. I'm not one to put musicians in the 'serious' bucket or the 'unserious', but if those buckets do exist, I'm betting both Sinatra and Jackson end up in the same one when you line them up against everyone else from the 20th century.

Quoting Wonderment: Alleged pederast.

Acquitted by jury of his peers. Admitted to nothing in settlement of civil allegations.

OJ's case taught me that we American's can not maintain our rationality around celebrities.

If Michael Jackson's death was an important cultural moment, I shudder at what will happen when Weird Al dies.

OJ's case taught me that we American's can not maintain our rationality around celebrities.

The OJ case was a lot more complex than it looked on TV. You have to put the verdict in the context of immense police corruption in Los Angeles at the time. Wikipedia:

The Rampart Scandal refers to widespread corruption in the Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums (or CRASH) anti-gang unit of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) Rampart Division in the late 1990s. More than 70 police officers in the CRASH unit were implicated in misconduct, making it one of the most widespread cases of documented police misconduct in United States history. The convicted offenses include unprovoked shootings, unprovoked beatings, planting of evidence, framing of suspects, stealing and dealing narcotics, bank robbery, perjury, and covering up evidence of these activities

I talked to a Los Angeles Superior Court judge about this trial and she said the verdict was not only unsurprising but actually rational, given the life experiences of at least some of the jurors. I, of course, do believe OJ murdered his wife and Mr. Goldman, but proving it was not so easy. Remember Mark Furman?

Nice!!!! We were supposed to play at some open jam kinda thing a few weeks ago and I remember somebody saying that "the guy who used to be Weird Al's bass player might be there." I thought that was one of the strangest ways to try to sell something that I have ever heard. Only in LA.

Possibly, but even you must admit Cockron(?) pushed the boundarys of professional ethics with his blatant use of the prosecutors fallacy. The infamous glove moment was also rather incredulous. Edit:
To be fair, I am not unbiased, when I found out he was a wife beater, I was ready to throw him in jail right then, regardless of the murder.

Quoting Starwatcher162536: The infamous glove moment was also rather incredulous.

Actually, no. That was a moment of FAIL by the prosecution. You never let the accused handle evidence like that. Cochran did what any smart defense attorney would have done and swatted that fat pitch right out of the park. You have to remember that he is there as an advocate for the accused, not someone trying to help arrive at the truth. You can complain about this aspect of our system, but it is the system we have, and he was well within the boundaries on that one. Plus, bonus points for the euphony and memorability of his related summation statement -- "If the glove doesn't fit, you must acquit." A shame that he was putting in his efforts on behalf of someone so distasteful, to be sure.

Quoting DoctorMoney: The view from a hundred years out probably isn't going to make that distinction. The both of them relied on image creation as much as music creation for their careers, and both had embarrassing artistic missteps.

I'm not one to put musicians in the 'serious' bucket or the 'unserious', but if those buckets do exist, I'm betting both Sinatra and Jackson end up in the same one when you line them up against everyone else from the 20th century.

I'm no fan of Sinatra -- indeed, I will turn him off if it's up to me -- but I do have to say he seems to have more staying power in the sense of multiple generations of fans who really, really like him. But a hundred years from now? I wouldn't bet against your prediction.

Quoting uncle ebeneezer: Nice!!!!

We were supposed to play at some open jam kinda thing a few weeks ago and I remember somebody saying that "the guy who used to be Weird Al's bass player might be there." I thought that was one of the strangest ways to try to sell something that I have ever heard. Only in LA.

LOL! How well I remember that from my time in LA -- there are some people who are so turned on by celebrity that even someone who used to be connected to someone who used to be someone seems important to them. ("Up next, Suzanne Somers's hairstylist!") Actually, though, I've seen such appeals work, or at least be made, in plenty of other places I've lived. Not WA's bass player precisely, but at that level of inanity.

Quoting Bloggin' Noggin: Bob's "God" would apparently not be a "transcendent" God who stands outside nature, but rather a God "immanent" in nature. Spinoza speaks of "Deus sive Natura" -- "God or Nature". When you think of this one thing, God-or-Nature under one attribute, you are thinking of it as Nature, and if you think of that same thing under a different attribute, you are thinking of it as God. Bob's God is a natural God, not a supernatural God -- or that's my interpretation of what I've heard and read so far.

I think your previous reference to Hegel is more relevant. Hegel inserts between Spinoza's God=Nature a third term, human history, which is supposed to reveal the progressive unfolding of freedom, culminating in the modern state and, according to some (Kojève, Fukuyama), in the "end of history" and the "reconciliation" of man and nature. Thus: God (the Absolute)=Nature+History. But Hegel could only perform this little trick by transcending the Kantian subject/object split, the separation of the "noumenal" realm (thing-in-itself) from the "phenomenal" realm (nature and human culture). Sorry for all this philosophical jargon, but it seems to me that Bob would like to do something similar to what Hegel did when he thought that he could

Quoting bjkeefe: I'm no fan of Sinatra -- indeed, I will turn him off if it's up to me -- but I do have to say he seems to have more staying power in the sense of multiple generations of fans who really, really like him. But a hundred years from now? I wouldn't bet against your prediction.

They certainly provide two polar opposites of masculinity in pop stars. I kinda think of Sinatra as being a boy-band star before the industry figured out that it's easier to make money at that gig when you pitch yourself at 13 year olds.

Quoting basman: He paid $20,000,000.00 in one settlemtn and millions in others: why again?

Jackson could well have had issues with children, put himself in extremely damaging situations (from a legal standpoint) with them, and have never abused them. Without access to the details, that scenario is just as plausible as the one in which he molested someone. The large dollar sign swings both ways -- it might be an inevitability that someone with that much available cash and his particular psychological issues was doomed to make a couple of large payouts until he learned to protect himself from litigation.

Bob, my favorite male vocalist is Frank Sinatra and I'll throw in Ellla Fitzgerald is my number 1 female artist. I love to hear them sing. John

I thought so too, then I read Outrage by Vincent Bugliosi. Monday morning quarterbacking, granted, but after he laid out how he would have made his arguments and pointed out all the rudimentary Law 101 mistakes that the prosecution made, it was pretty convincing that the verdict, while partly due to cultural influence (Rodney King, Rampart etc.) was mainly a slam-dunk that the prosecution fumbled horribly. Check it out. It's a great book.

Quoting grits-n-gravy: I've already alluded to what I intended by my derision of the use of a metaphor for a literal interpretation of the First Amendment non-establishment clause.

Not really. And, frankly, in suggesting that the use of the term "separation of church and state" is worthy of derision, you are either showing ignorance of the case law and how it's discussed or, as I rather suspect, a sharply partisan desire to reinterpret and change the current law, basically an attack on the 1st amendment as it's been understood.

Quoting grits-n-gravy: What I said was Ann really is interested in separating religion from all levels of public life, not the Jeffersonian wall of separation which was strictly a matter of federalism-i.e. the wall separates religion and the federal government only.

There are various issues here. I see nothing in anything that Ann has said here or in other diavlogs to suggest she takes an extreme view of the relationship between religion and the public square. As for the notion that the 1st amendment should only be interpreted to affect the federal government, that's not actually the case, even soon after it was enacted, in any case

Quoting Magic Flea: Bob, exactly what kind of god are we supposed to be agnostic on?

What's the difference between that and no god at all?

Massive props from me for that post, FWIW. Thanks.

I like Bugliosi a lot (not least of which for debunking the Kennedy assassination conspiracies so well), and maybe he would have won a conviction. Maybe. But Marcia Clark and Chris Darden were quite overmatched. The Dream Team was no joke -- it had some of the best legal minds and criminal defense lawyers around (Barry Sheck, Dershowitz, Cochran) and paid for some very fancy pathologists -- and the big mistake was trying the case downtown instead of Santa Monica. Imagine yourself a juror who lives in a neighborhood infected by corrupt evidence-planting cops. Then you hear about a couple of old white cops taking evidence home with them, and the third white detective is on tape talking about planting evidence on "niggers."

Quoting stephanie: Not really. And, frankly, in suggesting that the use of the term "separation of church and state" is worthy of derision, you are either showing ignorance of the case law and how it's discussed or, as I rather suspect, a sharply partisan desire to reinterpret and change the current law, basically an attack on the 1st amendment as it's been understood.

If you read carefully you'd notice I was deriding a misuse and abuse of the term. My ignorance of case law is irrelevant because there're plenty of legal scholars who are intimately familiar with the relevant case law and have concluded the metaphor has been misused and misunderstood. There is nothing wrong with having a desire to change current law especially if that law is unjust. Far from attacking the 1st Amendment, I favor an interpretation that's closer to the intent of the framers. For example, Daniel L. Dreisbach showed that existing case law around church-state arrangement rests on a flawed reading of the Danbury letter.

There are various issues here. I see nothing in anything that Ann has said here or in other diavlogs to suggest she takes an extreme

Yeah, Bugliosi made that point rather vehemently early on about the location of the trial. As anyone familiar with SoCal knows, Santa Monica and South Central are hardly one and the same (to say nothing of Brentwood.) A couple of the more interesting points from my memory of the book: Bugliosi points out several instances where the defense made claims that could have easily been challenged by a prosecutor with any idea of how a trial is meant to be fought. When the defense raised the issue of possible contamination of blood samples from the Bronco (I believe) the obvious counter-argument is that although contamination of evidence happens fairly regularly with the handling by any police force, the contamination and exposure of the blood sample would have had to miraculously not just be contaminated, but turn into the blood of the accused. Even Barry Sheck would not be able to explain that through routine exposure contamination. That requires an assumption of tampering/conspiracy, that even the defense was not dumb enough to make outright. In that case, as Bugliosi explained, a good prosecutor would force the defense into

Quoting grits-n-gravy: If you read carefully you'd notice I was deriding a misuse and abuse of the term.

No, I don't see that. Your original statement, which is what set off red flags, was simply: "What astounds me more is that a law professor thinks the first amendment stipulate separation of church from state." Once again, not only is the statement rather remarkable in that it's extremely common language, used by law professors (and judges) all the time, but people who complain about such language and try to argue that the 1st Amendment really means something else are typically people not comfortable with the American notion of freedom of religion at all, at least not as it's been generally understood. When I asked you about it, you failed to elaborate how you thought Ann Althouse's use of the term demonstrated a misunderstanding of it or an overly broad interpretation of the clause (and as I said, I don't recall Ann having a particularly strong "no religion in the public square" view, but she has seemed pretty mainstream in her discussion of it, the times I vaguely recall it coming up). Moreover, and even more disturbingly, your own explanation of

Your original statement, which is what set off red flags, was simply: "What astounds me more is that a law professor thinks the first amendment stipulate separation of church from state." Once again, not only is the statement rather remarkable in that it's extremely common language, used by law professors (and judges) all the time, but people who complain about such language and try to argue that the 1st Amendment really means something else are typically people not comfortable with the American notion of freedom of religion at all, at least not as it's been generally understood.

My statement isn't remarkable when you place it in context. Ann says church-state separation is rooted in the christian idea of a private, non-coercive religion that has virtually no role, or at least very little role in the public sphere. Therefore, since Islam is about coercion and mixing shari'a and state law Muslims cannot be trusted to uphold freedom of religion. The First Amendment (aside from how its been miscontrued) wasn't intended to remove religion from the public sphere. I think you're arguing for the sake of arguing. My suspicion is you're either a lawyer, a strong admirer of Ann, or both.

Quoting Francoamerican: Bloggin Noggin you are SO remarkably acute....sometimes. That is exactly the question I asked myself. I wonder if Bob has asked himself.

Well, thank you, Franco. I'm not sure whether he has thought about it or not. I'm curious whether Bob means for "God" to simply be a name for the tendency of the arc of the universe to bend toward justice, or whether God is the explanation of this tendency. Suppose that we establish that the laws of the universe make likely the emergence of some species with a concern for morality and that these laws make it likely that these creatures will make moral progress through history. Have we established the existence of "God" right there? Or is God's existence an inference to something which is supposed to explain why the laws of the universe are as they are -- an explanation of why we have this progressive universe rather than another kind of universe (or nothing at all).

Quoting Bloggin' Noggin: Or is God's existence an inference to something which is supposed to explain why the laws of the universe are as they are -- an explanation of why we have this progressive universe rather than another kind of universe (or nothing at all).

I've never understood why the "The universe is here and its laws are as they are because if they weren't, we wouldn't be sitting here talking about it" is not a satisfactory answer. (I am assuming this is not satisfactory to you.) Sure, it's fun to speculate that there might be Something More, but when you get right down to it, what's (philosophically) wrong with that attitude above?

All good points, but Bugliosi overthinks this one. He argues the case as he might before a panel of legal experts (the way the case would have been tried in Europe, for example), not a jury of ordinary LA working folks. It was enough for them to see any tainted evidence, one supremely racist cop (homicide detective Furhman) and a great defender of black civil rights -- Johnny Cochran -- swearing to them that the case was a frame-up. Case closed. There also may have been a bit of jury nullification going on, perhaps subconsciously: "I know OJ did it, but I will not do the bidding of a prosecution whose lead detective is on tape confessing how he framed 'niggers'. Fuck that!"

Well, from an intellectual point of view, it is just lazy. I hate anthropic type reasoning, as I feel it just punts the ball down the road. Far to easy I think to just default to the "Just the way it is" position, instead of just admitting its a hard problem, and we just don't know yet.

Here is a character from Nobel Literature laureate J.M. Coetzee's book "Diary of a Bad Year," expressing Bob's position, minus the "moral arc" business:

I have no desire to associate myself with the people behind the Intelligent Design movement. Nevertheless, ....as long as there is not one of us who has the faintest idea of how to go about constructing a horsefly from scratch, how can we disparage as intellectually naive the conclusion that the housefly must have been put together by an intelligence of a higher order than our own....

It does not seem to me philosophically retrograde to attribute intelligence to the universe as a whole, rather than just to a subset of mammals on Earth. An intelligent universe evolves purposively over time, even if the purpose in question may for ever by beyond the gasp of the human intellect and indeed beyond the range of our idea of what might constitute purpose.

Insofar as one might want to go further and distinguish a universal intelligence from the universe as a whole -- a step I see no reason to take -- one might want

Quoting Starwatcher162536: Well, from an intellectual point of view, it is just lazy.

I can see that complaint.

Quoting Starwatcher162536: I hate anthropic type reasoning, as I feel it just punts the ball down the road.

That one, not as much -- to me, the Weak Anthropic Principle's whole point is that it is not punting the ball further on down the road, the way positing a creator or prime mover does. Things. Just. Are. End of story. And then you don't have to keep rehashing a whole sheaf of metaphysical discussions.

Quoting Starwatcher162536: Far to easy I think to just default to the "Just the way it is" position, instead of just admitting its a hard problem, and we just don't know yet.

Of course I'll grant we don't know. I'll also agree that it's a hard problem, although it may turn out to be no problem at all (assuming we could ever prove it, which I doubt -- it amounts to proving non-existence of a creating entity, doesn't it?). Still, I have to say, I find this WAP attitude satisfactory most days, even satisfying. As the man says:

Hey everybody, let's have some fun
You only live for once
And when you're dead you're done
So let the good times roll ...

No actually Bugliosi argues that this (his perscription) is how you treat a case in front of a jury, regardless of their stations in life. People aren't stupid, and generally the people who spend a year on a trial, want to get it right. It is counsel's job to sway them to the proper decision. A trial is a chess game of many strategic moves. Reading his account of what the prosecution did, made the reader's head spin at how short-sighted they acted. He raises each of your points in his account and shows how you strategically counter each one (something the prosecutors never did.) Johnny Cochran and the defense never directly accused the police of a conspiracy, and for good reason. A good prosecutor shows the jury exactly why Cochran couldn't make that claim with a straight face. If Cochran does attempt to go down that road explicitly, the prosecutor is supposed to shoot holes in everything that doesn't add up so that the jury sees how ridiculous the premise. Clark and company let a lot of statements slide without challenging them. He does an entire chapter on

Quoting Ann Althouse: By the way, I do think Obama is an atheist, don't you?

I told my friend this, today. He is a talented dissembler, but what successful pol isn't? I feel safer in the knowledge.

Quoting bjkeefe: I've never understood why the "The universe is here and its laws are as they are because if they weren't, we wouldn't be sitting here talking about it" is not a satisfactory answer.

(I am assuming this is not satisfactory to you.)

Sure, it's fun to speculate that there might be Something More, but when you get right down to it, what's (philosophically) wrong with that attitude above?

Well, as a matter of fact, what I find satisfying is irrelevant to the question I was asking -- which had entirely to do with understanding the role of Bob's "God" in the overall theory. But I guess I'll bite anyway. Your "answer" is not an answer to the question you implicitly raise. You are not explaining why the universe is here and why these laws obtain. This universe would be here and laws would obtain even if I had died as a baby. And even if a catastrophe had wiped out our proto-human ancestors, all laws that didn't specifically reference humans would still obtain. What you are answering is a different question: "why do we observe these laws and this universe?" -- part of the answer to that will have

Bloggin' the problem I see with your analogy is this. No doubt, the urge to question beyond whatever dead-end level we find ourselves at, is a good thing. Indeed it is the hallmark of science and the foundation of exploratory progress. To ask why the coin flips with a notable probability is to search for the details of the next level of investigation (the effects of gravity on the coin, the energy involved in the flip etc.) But with regards to the why questions of the Universe, the God or supernatural avenue doesn't get us anywhere. In fact it is a dead end of it's own and one that has been used all too often when we wanted to explain away any given gap in our current knowledge. So when someone asserts that asking "why" is important, I agree but only insofar as the attempt is to continue into avenues that are observable, testable etc. (at least theoretically, at some point.) But as soon as the why begins to be answered by suggestions of something outside the realm of nature, it seems a colossal waste of time. I think that is one

Quoting Bloggin' Noggin: I'm curious whether Bob means for "God" to simply be a name for the tendency of the arc of the universe to bend toward justice, or whether God is the explanation of this tendency. ).

I would say he probably means the former, given his (perhaps unconscious) Hegelian tendencies . God is just another name for the unfolding of justice in history, as I speculate in my reply to your remark about Spinoza (above? below?)

Quoting Bloggin' Noggin: Suppose that we establish that the laws of the universe make likely the emergence of some species with a concern for morality and that these laws make it likely that these creatures will make moral progress through history. Have we established the existence of "God" right there? ).

No. But, as Kant argued forcefully, the mere fact of morality may compel us to postulate freedom, immortality and the existence of God because without such postulates morality appears problematic, to say the least. Natural science can tell us only that like all other spatiotemporal beings we are completely determined by antecedent physical events. Only our "practical reason" gives us insight into freedom and all the rest. Are all three postulates necessary? Nescio.

Quoting Bloggin' Noggin: Or

Quoting Wonderment: Here is a character from Nobel Literature laureate J.M. Coetzee's book "Diary of a Bad Year," expressing Bob's position, minus the "moral arc" business:

"It does not seem to me philosophically retrograde to attribute intelligence to the universe as a whole, rather than just to a subset of mammals on Earth. An intelligent universe evolves purposively over time, even if the purpose in question may for ever by beyond the gasp of the human intellect and indeed beyond the range of our idea of what might constitute purpose. " Hmmm...This seems to be a favorite trope of a certain kind of misanthropic philosopher. It all began with the granddaddy of cosmic despair, Bertrand Russell. Like all such attempts to think ourselves out of the picture of the whole universe by assuming that we already have a picture of the whole universe, this one seems to me self-contradictory. What sense can we attribute to words like "intelligence" and "purpose" without assuming our own intelligence and purposes?

Quoting uncle ebeneezer: Bloggin' the problem I see with your analogy is this. No doubt, the urge to question beyond whatever dead-end level we find ourselves at, is a good thing. Indeed it is the hallmark of science and the foundation of exploratory progress. To ask why the coin flips with a notable probability is to search for the details of the next level of investigation (the effects of gravity on the coin, the energy involved in the flip etc.) But with regards to the why questions of the Universe, the God or supernatural avenue doesn't get us anywhere. In fact it is a dead end of it's own and one that has been used all too often when we wanted to explain away any given gap in our current knowledge. So when someone asserts that asking "why" is important, I agree but only insofar as the attempt is to continue into avenues that are observable, testable etc. (at least theoretically, at some point.) But as soon as the why begins to be answered by suggestions of something outside the realm of nature, it seems a colossal waste of time. I think that is one

Quoting Bloggin' Noggin: Well, as a matter of fact, what I find satisfying is irrelevant to the question I was asking -- which had entirely to do with understanding the role of Bob's "God" in the overall theory.

A fair point. Apologies for going off on a tangent.

But I guess I'll bite anyway. Your "answer" is not an answer to the question you implicitly raise. You are not explaining why the universe is here and why these laws obtain. This universe would be here and laws would obtain even if I had died as a baby. And even if a catastrophe had wiped out our proto-human ancestors, all laws that didn't specifically reference humans would still obtain.

Well, maybe (and actually, of course I believe this). But how would we know? And who would be around to argue about it?

What you are answering is a different question: "why do we observe these laws and this universe?" -- part of the answer to that will have to reference how we come to be here observing. But to say that our existence explains the existence of the universe is to have delusions of grandeur.

Pardon me for not making myself clear, but I didn't mean

Quoting Bloggin' Noggin: My original post raised the question whether Bob clearly intended to EXPLAIN certain presumed facts by reference to God, or whether he regarded those presumed facts as BEING (in a much-reduced sense) God. You presuppose that he is not doing the latter. Is it clear that he is not?

Hi BN - While this has not been clear in his interviews, my sense from the EOG book is that Bob does both. And more. He states (in so many words, and sometimes more tentatively than others) that the moral directionality of history (via people's ability to harness non-zero-sumness) is both a product of the divine and also embodies the divine, aka God. But he also makes reference to God having desires and to God/gods being entirely human creations. I find it quite confusing because all of these versions of God are all mingled in with historical data and there us much switching back and forth , sometimes within the same sentence, between the various versions of God. It would perhaps have been better to lay out the history and then lay out the possible implications of that history in two separate sections. If you

Re: your coin example: if I tossed a coin 70 trillion times in a row and got heads 70 trillion times, that sequence of heads is just as likely as any other sequence of heads and tails. However, it is significantly less likely than getting some sequence of not all heads. Consequently, if I had only one try and if I got 70 trillion heads I would think the coin is weighted, or has heads on both sides. I would think there was a trick, unless that happened once in, say, 7*10^20 tries. This is because, of course, we find that sequence of heads interesting for our purposes. I think the same thing explains why people find the universe's giving rise to life interesting. If the probability is indeed 1/10^200 that you have a life-permitting universe, and (10^200 power)-1 that you don't, then the fact that, of all the possible universes, we have a life-permitting universe, seems to demand an explanation, unless you have a multiverse with an infinite number of universes. As for explanations, I find the following explanation illuminating: Person 1: Why did you eat my sandwich?
Person 2: Because I wanted to. Admittedly, this explanation ("Because I wanted to") says nothing about physics or chemistry, but it nonetheless seems to me to count as an explanation. By

Quoting grits-n-gravy: I think you're arguing for the sake of arguing. My suspicion is you're either a lawyer, a strong admirer of Ann, or both.

No, not for the sake of arguing, yes, no, and no. Unlike many here, I don't have strong feelings about Ann at all, although she can be annoying. The reason I responded to your statement is simply what I said above: Your statement: "What astounds me more is that a law professor thinks the first amendment stipulate separation of church from state" is itself astounding. Either you find Ann offensive so just wanted to slam her, knowing that what she said was unremarkable (and I don't care what your personal reaction to her is, but what she said was factually fine), or you are trying to claim that mainstream Constitutional understanding is flat wrong and unsupportable (including the cases using the language and other writings which do) based on a poor argument (that the specific phrase is not in the text of the Constitution). The latter is something I've seen, but only from people who want to greatly limit the protections we have in the US on religious freedom. Now, of course, these people (a subsect of the

Quoting Bobby G: [...]
If the probability is indeed 1/10^200 that you have a life-permitting universe, and (10^200 power)-1 that you don't, then the fact that, of all the possible universes, we have a life-permitting universe, seems to demand an explanation, unless you have a multiverse with an infinite number of universes.

The entire history of science is just a story of uniting of things, that at first glance seems to be separate phenomenon. Until we find a coherent GUT that has been experimentally verified along a number of different approaches, it is foolhardy to try and give a probability to the existence of our universe. As of now, I could just as easily see it being 1 as 1E-100000.

Person 1: Why does the universe exist?
Person 2: Because God wanted it to.

Of course, I'd want to know more--like, why did God want a universe to exist?--but it seems to me to count as an explanation nonetheless, particularly if we get elaborations of God's reasons such as:

Leibniz: because God is all-good, this world is the best of all possible worlds, and an all-good being necessarily creates the best of all possible worlds.
Robert M. Adams: because God wanted to exhibit the virtue of grace, and

The only way we will ever keep finding answers, is to assume there are more to be found, even if there are not.
Edit:

Quoting bjkeefe: Of course I'll grant we don't know. I'll also agree that it's a hard problem, although it may turn out to be no problem at all (assuming we could ever prove it, which I doubt -- it amounts to proving non-existence of a creating entity, doesn't it?).

Well, if we had a GUT that explained...everything. It might be possible to show that the universe has only one possible configuration, once you take into consideration all of the constraints.

Quoting Bobby G: As for explanations, I find the following explanation illuminating:

Person 1: Why did you eat my sandwich?
Person 2: Because I wanted to.

Admittedly, this explanation ("Because I wanted to") says nothing about physics or chemistry, but it nonetheless seems to me to count as an explanation. By the same principle, this seems to me to count as an explanation:

Person 1: Why does the universe exist?
Person 2: Because God wanted it to.

I am not clear how these are illuminating explanations, especially the 2nd one, which some would consider to be a guesstimate regarding a 3rd party's intentions. What do they illuminate? One could just as easily answer the 2nd question with the following: "Because a sadistic force called the Devil wanted it to." Based on the above, it would seem that each of the below would also count as explanations: Person 1: Why do terrible, horrible, no good, very bad things happen to people?
Person 2: Because God wants them to happen. Person 1: Why do terrible, horrible, no good, very bad things happen to people?
Person 2: Because God is powerless to stop them from happening. Person 1: Why do terrible, horrible, no good, very bad things happen to people?
Person 2: Because people deserve it. Person 1: Why do terrible, horrible, no good, very bad things happen to

Hello Bobby,
I get the impression that you may intend to disagree with me, when in fact I pretty much agree.
The only question is whether we should look at the existence of life as antecedently so suprising -- or are we following Pangloss in being amazed that noses are so well suited to the support of eye-glasses. Do we find life special just because we are examples of it?
I waffle between the two views.

First, I'm not sure that there's no way to determine which is right. For example, there might be a way to determine which is right based on evidence that comes to light later. Second, there could be other considerations which might make one of the explanations better than the other. For instance, it could be the case that you think morality is objective (on this view, bigotry against gays would be wrong even if everyone except gays--or even including gays--really enjoyed it), and that you think moral objectivity depends on the existence of God. From there, you could rule out certain of your explanations--e.g., the one where God is evil. Second, even if there were no way to determine which was right, I would still count them all as explanations. It would just be impossible to say which explanation was right. (For example, given the information we have, there may be no way to know why Jesus' apostles started spreading Christianity--we might not have enough information. Nevertheless, "because they thought Jesus was God" would still count as an explanation.)

Hi Bloggin', I wasn't sure whether you disagreed with me or not. Since you brought up a response to an extremely surprising outcome that I found unpersuasive,* even though I didn't know whether you agreed with the response, I decided to offer my own response "just in case." *--The response I'm thinking of is: "sure it's unlikely that you're going to get 70 trillion heads in a row, but each particular outcome is just as likely as any other, therefore you shouldn't be any more surprised by 70 trillion heads than you are by 47,948,643,439,008 heads and the rest tails." On another note, probability assignments get _very_ tricky if there is an infinitely large multiverse, as I'm sure you know from reading On the Plurality of Worlds.

Quoting Starwatcher162536: The only way we will ever keep finding answers, is to assume there are more to be found, even if there are not.

Agreed, of course.

Well, if we had a GUT that explained...everything. It might be possible to show that the universe has only one possible configuration, once you take into consideration all of the constraints.

Depends what you mean by "explains everything." This is sort of begging the question, isn't it?

The reason I responded to your statement is simply . . .[the statement] itself astounding.

What I find even more astounding than Ann's statement about church-state separation and your feigned astonishment of my statement is Ann's slanderous statement that Barack Obama is a closet atheist. That slander itself is evil personified. I don't know why I've even expended this amount of bandwidth pondering her absurdities but this will be my last installment.

Quoting Bobby G: Of course, I'd want to know more--like, why did God want a universe to exist?--but it seems to me to count as an explanation nonetheless, particularly if we get elaborations of God's reasons such as:

Leibniz: because God is all-good, this world is the best of all possible worlds, and an all-good being necessarily creates the best of all possible worlds.
Robert M. Adams: because God wanted to exhibit the virtue of grace, and couldn't do that unless there were dependent creatures to grace.
Peter van Inwagen: because God wanted to create beings to love and to love God back.

They might all be false, of course, but they do seem to count as explanations--maybe not full explanations, but explanations at least to some degree.

Hello Bobby G These are all variations on the cosmological argument, aren't they? I was wondering, since you wrote your dissertation on Kant, if you think that they can escape the dilemma Kant poses in the 1st Antinomy of Pure Reason, to wit, that it is equally possible to "prove" both the thesis that the universe is finite and has a beginning in time, and the antithesis that the universe is infinite and

Quoting Francoamerican: ... there is no way of escaping the antinomy.

I was going to make a chemistry joke, but I see from the first line of Wikipedia that it probably wouldn't have been very fresh.

Quoting bjkeefe: Certainly. And in reality, I don't think we'll ever stop asking "why?" or at least "how?" Nor do I wish that we would. It's just that in some ultimate sense, when people seem to take for granted that the universe has to have a direction and/or was created for a purpose, I tend to hear that as wishful thinking, or putting ourselves in an unwarrantedly elevated position. Anthropomorphizing the universe, perhaps.

So, I thought I'd throw what I did out there.

I don't think it has to have a direction or purpose, and I certainly don't take it for granted.
I believe that as a matter of fact there has been moral progress -- in fact it strikes me that one has to really bend over backwards to deny that there has in fact been moral progress -- democracy, equal rights for women, the end of slavery and segregation.
Reading Nonzero made me ask the question whether or not there was an explanation for the moral progress we've made (not that we never slip back) -- and made a case that the progress had been going on for longer than I had initially considered.
I certainly think it's a worthwhile question to ask

Quoting Bobby G:
*--The response I'm thinking of is: "sure it's unlikely that you're going to get 70 trillion heads in a row, but each particular outcome is just as likely as any other, therefore you shouldn't be any more surprised by 70 trillion heads than you are by 47,948,643,439,008 heads and the rest tails."

I wasn't imagining millions of heads in a row. Rather I was imagining someone who faces some particular series of heads and tails and regards THAT as something amazing that required explanation because it would have been totally unpredictable beforehand. The improbability of having predicted this exact outcome beforehand is not sufficient to call for explanation.

Quoting Bloggin' Noggin: I don't think it has to have a direction or purpose, and I certainly don't take it for granted.
I believe that as a matter of fact there has been moral progress -- in fact it strikes me that one has to really bend over backwards to deny that there has in fact been moral progress -- democracy, equal rights for women, the end of slavery and segregation.

Progress from our self-interested perspective at least, sure.

Reading Nonzero made me ask the question whether or not there was an explanation for the moral progress we've made (not that we never slip back) -- and made a case that the progress had been going on for longer than I had initially considered.
I certainly think it's a worthwhile question to ask what accounts for what progress we've made. I don't know that any particularly cosmic answer has to be given to that question. I'm inclined to think that the explanation is just that moral truth at a fairly basic level is actually very easy to grasp intellectually (unlike physics). What stands in the way of our grasping it is usually self-interest, not a

Quoting bjkeefe: I do not put any stock in people who comment on an event that has already occurred who say "What are the odds of that happening?" Particularly when we know so little about the (statistical) universe of possibilities, not to mention the details of so much of the physical universe. I don't see any reason to think there aren't countless other "Goldilocks zones" around other stars, for example, and for another, I don't see any reason to believe that intelligence can only arise in an oxygen-breathing, hydrophilic, carbon-based form whose lifespan is of order three billion seconds.

This sounds very close to the position I meant to attribute to you when I said "your position". You think that those who offer this kind of argument are like Pangloss, amazed that our noses and ears are so well designed for the wearing of spectacles. As I said, I'm highly sympathetic to this suspicion. Of course whether an event has already happened or not is not the issue. Darwin's theory clearly regards the existence of living organisms as something to be explained, because their simply appearing by chance would be fantastically improbable. Or in my imaginary case

Quoting Bloggin' Noggin: This sounds very close to the position I meant to attribute to you when I said "your position". You think that those who offer this kind of argument are like Pangloss, amazed that our noses and ears are so well designed for the wearing of spectacles. As I said, I'm highly sympathetic to this suspicion.

Of course whether an event has already happened or not is not the issue. Darwin's theory clearly regards the existence of living organisms as something to be explained, because their simply appearing by chance would be fantastically improbable.

I agree that it is something yet to be explained. I'm less convinced about the improbability of life forming "by chance." This is largely because we humans have been around (and aware) for such a short time and already, it appears, we have come close to proposing plausible mechanisms for the formation of life from inert materials. Seems to me if we have been able to do this with only a few centuries (or milliennia, maybe) of scientific reasoning under our belts, there's no reason not to think that we could, in another short while, come up with a mechanism, The

Quoting bjkeefe: I agree that it is something yet to be explained. I'm less convinced about the improbability of life forming "by chance." This is largely because we humans have been around (and aware) for such a short time and already, it appears, we have come close to proposing plausible mechanisms for the formation of life from inert materials. Seems to me if we have been able to do this with only a few centuries (or milliennia, maybe) of scientific reasoning under our belts, there's no reason not to think that we could, in another short while, come up with a mechanism, The Mechanism, or several mechanisms. I guess I feel like if we humans can think of it two cosmological ticks after we climb down out of the trees, it is not so spectacular, in some sense.

Just as a point of clarification, the original emergence of life from non-life is not what I had in mind. My point is that Darwin agrees with Paley that the adjustment of very complex means to ends in many living organisms requires an explanation. Even though horses emerged long ago, we can reasonably assume that they didn't just pop

So we are moving on? I find it odd that you continue to maintain that Ann's statement that the US has separation of church and state is "astounding," when it's clearly not, but at this point probably nowhere to go until the topic comes up again.

Quoting grits-n-gravy: Ann's slanderous statement that Barack Obama is a closet atheist. That slander itself is evil personified.

I think she's wrong (he seems like a typical theologically liberal Protestant to me, based on the many I know), I think that she seems to so delight in making the claim is somewhat weird and it makes me wonder a bit about what her underlying intent is (I suspect she's trying to annoy a certain segment of Obama supporters, but that's based on a casual reading of her interactions only). However, "evil"? Really? Why?

Quoting Bloggin' Noggin: Just as a point of clarification, the original emergence of life from non-life is not what I had in mind. My point is that Darwin agrees with Paley that the adjustment of very complex means to ends in many living organisms requires an explanation. Even though horses emerged long ago, we can reasonably assume that they didn't just pop into existence fully formed as the result of purely random processes (as you might explain the emergence of a peculiarly shaped rock). Something had to have "designed" the horse.
Darwin of course differs with Paley about what did the "designing" and he does give chance the creative role, turning the "design" into something more like editing.
My point was that this is a case where we look at ourselves and other organisms and recognize that even after the fact -- even though our emergence took place long ago -- we are improbable enough that we demand more than a brute fact explanation.
This was relevant to a principle that you seemed to be employing above.

I'm not sure which principle you're referring to, but no matter. To the rest

Hi Brendan,
Yes, I know a reasonable amount about evolution. You'll find that I said that the "design" in Darwin's case looked a lot more like editing (of chance processes). I kind of despair of explaining myself within these little boxes here in the forum.
When I mean to be addressing a part of an argument, I never seem able to make it clear how my point is limited -- that I am not addressing the whole of the argument. In the current case, I was restricting myself to Paley's challenge: surely the existence of these organisms with their adjustment of multiple mechanisms to a particular end require an explanation: the eye doesn't just happen to see the way that a rock might just happen to look like Daniel Craig. Darwin implicitly agrees with this point, but differs with Paley over whether or not the explanation of the complex teleology we find in organisms must be explained by an intelligent creator.
I fully agree with Darwin in thinking it does not require an intelligent creator ---- and that the mechanism he proposes (natural selection among random mutations) is the actual explanation. I agree with BOTH Darwin and Paley

Quoting Bloggin' Noggin: [...]

Noted. Nothing really to add.

Ann is way off base in asserting: "He was produced by other people. He wasn't the complete talent behind all of the music." Unlike Presley and Sinatra, Jackson was in fact the complete talent behind his post-J5 music. He not only was the greatest live and video performer of his generation, he wrote most of his material, and nearly all of his biggest hits (Billie Jean, Beat It, Don't Stop Til You Get Enough, I Just Can't Stop Loving You, Bad, Smooth Criminal, The Way You Make Me Feel, Dirty Diana, Black or White, and Earth Song are all solo Jackson compositions) and had a direct involvement in the production, as well as arranging all the vocals. Nobody involved, from engineer Bruce Swedien to Quincy Jones to star collaborators, would dispute that every single Michael Jackson track and LP had one creative force behind it: MJ. No one in contemporary hip hop music (the dominant popular music form in the US and increasingly worldwide) would fail to attribute a huge debt to Jackson. His historical cultural legacy is rivaled worldwide only by the Beatles (Elvis can't even come close) and probably clearly eclipsed only by Chaplin. There is a clear underlying

Yes and if he wasn't a child molester he was certainty an individual with some very perverse sleeping habits. Does the talent outweigh the perversion. I think it unfortunate that the talent is over hyped and lauded and the perversion essentially excused.

His guilt or innocence of that crime is irrelevant to my comment: that he was both the primary musical force behind his work and was of massive cultural significance, two things that Bob and Ann disputed. Does talent outweigh perversion? How can such a question be answered? Great art has always overshadowed flawed artists. How flawed was this man? You and I cannot know for sure. But the art speaks for itself.

true - the art is separate from the personal issues. but, on an artistic level, i think he gets over-hyped. look at the circus we've been subjected to over mj compared to an order of magnitude or two lesser response to the deaths of more talented and influential artists such as James Brown. (influential in a musical sense, JB had a much larger influence on music than did MJ, MJ probably effected more people on a personal level due to his popularity)

I don't know about you but I haven't been subjected to a circus. Maybe if I watched cable news all day I might be--but that's a circus any day of the year, so you should know what you're getting into. Other than that, The BET Awards had a hastily assembled tribute to him within the existing awards ceremony, and there was the relatively tasteful 2-hour memorial yesterday at the Staples Center. There will probably be a segment on him at next year's Grammys, a few tribute songs recorded by big-name artists with accompanying videos, and maybe some young up-and-coming artist scores a medium-sized hit with an MJ cover. Doesn't seem like a circus or out of proportion to me. The lurid tabloid attention has always been a circus and probably will be for another decade. But, again, that's irrelevant to the man's musical legacy. I would question whether Brown was demonstrably more talented than Jackson. His purely musical innovations were undeniably greater, and he pioneered the type of R&B-bandleader-as-dancing-showman role that Jackson would assume. But Jackson's mastery of pop songcraft and production trumps Brown's (I don't think Brown ever had a #1 single--Jackson had over a

Quoting Colonel K: [...] But, again, that's irrelevant to the man's musical legacy.

I would question whether Brown was demonstrably more talented than Jackson. His purely musical innovations were undeniably greater, and he pioneered the type of R&B-bandleader-as-dancing-showman role that Jackson would assume. But Jackson's mastery of pop songcraft and production trumps Brown's (I don't think Brown ever had a #1 single--Jackson had over a dozen) ...

For what it's worth, my own tastes are that I still love listening to any number of James Brown songs -- e.g., "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag," "I Got You (I Feel Good)," "Get Up," "It's a Man's Man's Man's World" -- and in general, I am always happy to hear him. Even when, as they so often do, his hits encourage white people at office parties to hit the dance floor. By contrast, with the possible exception of one or two Jackson 5 tunes, I can't think of anything by MJ that I'd feel bad about never hearing again. In other words, I think that though MJ's songs may have reached higher sales peaks, James Brown's songs have much more staying power. But, as I say, just a matter of taste (even if I think it's widely shared).

It is of course a matter of taste. MJ sold 750 million records (and climbing) by appealing to the taste of a lot of people. I don't know anything about office parties, but MJ made a career out of getting bodies on the dance floor. Obviously Brown's work has demonstrated staying power simply by virtue of being around longer (most of his best recordings are pre-1970). Time will tell whether Jackson has the same longevity, but if this week's gargantuan CD and digital track sales are any indication, his musical reputation has survived a decade of horrible press and will only grow as he takes his place in the deceased pop star firmament. We obviously have scant data to examine with pop music, having only existed less than a century. Bing Crosby sold half a billion records without having nearly the same musical legacy as Frank Sinatra, who sold far fewer. But my hunch is that in 2050 there will be more nanoItues bumping "Billie Jean" than "Love Me Tender" or "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag."

Quoting bjkeefe: Actually, I'm always a little worried about how tinfoil-y my hat is when it comes to The Family.

Nonetheless, I will pass along a link to this post by Steve M., for those interested in The Family/The Fellowship and Jeff Sharlet.

Quoting bjkeefe: ... the weird sort of Christianism practiced by The Family/The Fellowship -- that DC cult that he and many other GOP politicians are involved with.

Move over, Mark Sanford. Time for another Republican from your little club to start confessing his own marital infidelity: Chip Pickering! (via)

Comparing MJ to JB is like comparing a peanut butter & jelly sandwich to peanut butter. Brown's innovation, the funky groove, was a major component in many of Jackson's best songs. Jackson was smart in grabbing the right elements and crafting them into hit songs, but he didn't really do anything musically, all that innovative (video is another story.) From a musician's perspective, I can tell you that I don't think I have ever been asked to give something a "Michael Jackson" feel, nor have I ever used anything particular from his music as a template for writing something new. Whereas I'm asked to give something "a little James Brown" on a fairly regular basis by people who hire me. And when I'm constructing anything that I want to make people dance, James Brown grooves are one of the first bullets I load into my musical revolver. I think the MJ/Elvis comparison is much more apt. Both were hugely successful but not particularly pioneers in a musical sense. Both had larger than life personas and bizarre lifestyles. And while they were the biggest sellers of their time, I rarely hear any of my musician friends trying to capture (steal) their ideas

HILLARIOUS!!! Of course the GOP will filibuster any bill that demands the purchase of a black light!