Randy Pausch’s death shows us grief, Internet style

This Wired article, “Mourning the Internet Famous,” has an enlightening viewpoint on how the decentralized Internet is changing our grief, using Randy Pausch’s death as a case study. From the article:

At some level, these comments are a bit crazy. It wouldn’t make sense in any other context to write or say what people are writing in the comments sections of blogs across the country. You can’t imagine telling someone about Randy Pausch’s death and them saying to you, “I am real sorry for your loss Jai,” because you are not, in fact, Jai.

But given the searchability of the internet, this behavior isn’t that nuts. It doesn’t actually matter what URL you put your condolences on, it’s all part of Googleverse, so Jai could find it if she wanted to find it.

The mourning also mimics the way that people experience Pausch’s powerful oration. You interacted with Randy through a little box embedded in a webpage. Your headphones piped his voice clear and strong into the center of your brain, almost as if some deep part of your own mind was delivering his nuggets of wisdom. He was talking to you alone, not the hundreds packed into a theater or your family gathered around the television. In response, then, it made sense to get personal and say, directly, “Thanks, Randy. We’ll miss you.”

This mourning splits the difference between the small and generally private funerals of our friends and family and the public spectacles that marked the passings of Stalin, or Elvis, or Princess Di. Millions of people grieved alone in the asynchronous communities of the internet.

I’m a little disappointed at their description of the purpose of death rituals:

Still, at whatever scale and medium chosen, all these death rituals retain their universal purpose. They all provide convincing evidence that though the star may die, the universe continues. Though the Marine is gone, the corps lives on.

But, Wired is hardly a theological journal. The “the marine is gone, the corps lives on” theory of death has little consolation. As if at one’s deathbed one is told, “Have no fear: though you die, take comfort in the fact I’m still alive.” The depth of grief deserves better than this.

Thankfully, the “mob” character of the Internet brings into clear focus that the deceased was, in this world, surrounded by “a great cloud of witnesses.” Some known, some unknown but all of them touched, loved and mourning. Perhaps this might point us to know more fully the Church as spiritual communion between the living and the dead, to love more fully to the God who redeems it and to trust more fully that we, too, shall find resurrection.

I don’t want [lab]oratory to devolve into a link blog, but I’m going to pass this one along too. Original material is on its way. Honestly.

Geeky stained glass isn’t just for church anymore

Several blogs are noticing When Geeks and Stained Glass Collide, a cataloging of the best of the best of geeky stained glass. Most of them have a video game or pop culture theme. Some enshrine science (I like the EM spectrum). All of them are real glass. Yes, somebody painstakingly made that Spider-Man window with two human hands.

For more, but photoshopped, geeky stained glass, try Worth 1000.

Our postcard for Bishop Robinson

Today’s congregation stuck around after the final hymn to take this picture. I added the text and sent it to our bishop, Gene Robinson. Many people in the church are reading his blog and we wanted to return the favor and send him a message of our love and prayers.

Lambeth Conference on the Colbert Report

Stephen Colbert did a five minute piece on the Lambeth Conference last night. It’s a hilarious must-see. Fast-forward to the five-minute mark to get it directly.

Watch it here.

Blogging God is Not Great, Chapter 17

Chapter 17: An Objection Anticipated: The Last-Ditch “Case” Against Secularism

I’ve been looking forward to this chapter also. The two points that he gives have been in the back of my mind since the beginning of the book:

1. WIthout divine authority, humanity “will act in the most unbrided and abandoned manner” (230).
2. Secular governments (USSR, China, etc) are also guilty of similar grave evils.

Hitchens astutley points out the folly of saying that religions are no worse than Nazism or Stalinism. It’s a pretty weak ground to argue from. Further, he goes on to argue that religious folk in Europe and Russia lent aid and support to fascism and communism in its early years. He names Pope Pius XI explicity, but he hasn’t so far engaged Bonhoeffer, who was featured in the early chapters of the book.

I’m perplexed at his assertion about Vichy France on page 237. He says that the 1789 revolutionary motto Libertie, Egalitie, Fraternatie was removed from currency and replaced with “the Christian ideal motto” of Familie, Travail, Patrie (Family, Work, Homeland). I don’t argue that the motto was replaced, but what makes this a “Christian ideal?” It appears to me to be nothing more than a Francophone version of Arbeit macht frei, Work Makes One Free. The Christian ideal, to the contrary, is the the Truth shall set you free, not Work, not Homeland, not Family. It’s confusing to me, but I’m getting used to the attempts as proof by assertion in this book.

I’m not familiar enough with Vatican-Nazi relations to contradict formally anything that Hitchens is writing. He entertains Nazism for about seven pages here. However, his only source is Cornwell’s Hitler’s Pope. After reading one unsympathetic book on the subject, Hitchens feels ready to pontificate himself. Has he bothered reading, say, two books on the subject? Perhaps a second one with a different viewpoint? Like the Galileo affair, I’m pleased enough to know that there is more than one interpretation of the events.

However, whatever the interpretation, the fact remains: Christians of all churches were complicit in the early days of fascism. “It has been admitted by the religious authorities themselves” (242). He admits a small place for a few activities of “churchmen,” perhaps having Bonhoeffer and Barth in mind, that bore positive witness from religion. Again, the error is enough for conviction; no room is to be found for contrition, repentance or redemption.

Again Hitchens names religion as the product of idiocy and fear (245, 247). Of course, it is an idiocy and fear from which he is exempted. One wonders how he among so few have made this transcendant move and if he might, as a secular Prometheus, impart that skill to the idiotic, fearful masses. To have this wisdom and withhold it, only to watch the weak suffer, is immoral.

Toward the end of the chapter, he gives some credit to the religious folk turning over South African apartheid. He does no honor to Desmond Tutu or Nelson Mandela by bothering to mention their names. Indeed, he would not dare mention that one is an Anglican bishop and the other is a Methodist who has spoken many times about the importance of his faith. No, they are namelessly commemorated as “secular Christians.”

An interesting read to be sure. It is quite useless to assert the superiority of religion on the basis of its morality. Plenty of secular folk can be moral people and plenty of religious folk have been profoundly immoral. It doesn’t take sixteen chapters to show what can be gotten from casual observation, however.

Taking Htichens as an examplar of secular and rational humanism, I am surprised continually to find that he has no space for forgiveness. He hasn’t shown it so far and I’m not expecting him to bring it up in the last chapters.

Perhaps the gulf between these two worldviews is not morality, not intellect, not an appreciation of the transcendant and not love. The gulf is the ability to repent and to forgive.

Blogging God is Not Great, Chapters 14-16

Neither chapters 14 and 15 have any endnotes, citations or references. There are, however, numerous block quotes that come from somewhere.

Chapter 14: There is no “eastern” solution

I’ve seen this chapter coming from a long way off. It disappoints in some ways but fits right into Hitchens’s rhetoric so far. He opens with the story of Bhagwan Sri Rajneesh who ran a cult-style ashram through the 1980s. Hitchens did journalistic work on the ashram some time ago and relates his first-hand experiences there.

Again, he tries this example to prove the case. By the power of not much more than anecdote, the reader is to understand that eastern religions are all as corrupted at the western ones. To his credit, Hitchens tries to point out that the typical Western attitude toward eastern religions is flawed. He points to Hindu violence and Buddhist fascism as examples that are contrary to the common American view of those religions as peaceful, laid-back and harmless.

He never mentions Sam Harris in the chapter, but Harris’s shadow looms throughout. In Harris’s 2006 book Letter to a Christian Nation, he advocates for non-violent Jainism as a way forward in the feud between apparently-Christian America and the Middle East. Hitchens appear to have this in mind as the chapter title points to “no eastern solution.”

Interestingly, Hitchens brings up British Imperial attitudes toward Sri Lanka and India. Out of guilt, he asserts, the West often tries to paint the East and its religions as culturally accomplished, intelligent and artistic, peaceful and wise. In attempting to demolish the concept of an “eastern solution,” Hitchens seems to have done a fine job of vindicating the colonial attitude. To read his accounts, the East is just as idolatrous, barbaric and savage as Queen Victoria would like it.

Chapter 15: Religion as an Original Sin

Chapter 16: Is Religion Child Abuse?

These chapters repeat ad nauseaum points that Hitchens has already made. In greater detail, he complains about his disgust at the bizarre practices that come out of teachings on blood sacrifice and atonement.He selectively brings evidence for his one-sided arguments. He overlooks alternative explanations. He cannot conceive of religion without the embarrasing practices he describes and yet it exists almost everywhere around him.

These two chapters are an exercise in willful ignorance on Hitchens’s part. Religions must of necessity have the same bizarre practices they did centuries ago. They cannot be conceived apart of it. No notice is taken of religious people who speak against or otherwise addressed these criticisms.

At the end of chapter 14, Hitchens vindicated a Victorian worldview. Here in 15 and 16, he choses to ignore plentiful evidence to his contrary and keeps up logic that his Enlightenment predecessors would be embarrased by.

Blogging God is not Great, Chapters 11-13

Chapter 11: “The Lowly Stamp of their Origin”: Religion’s Corrupt Beginnings

My sympathy for Christopher Hitchens at the end of chapter ten is gone (again). This eleventh chapter attempts to prove that religion is derived from the lowly human desire to separate a fool from his money. He begins by calling the reader to Hobbes’s Leviathan chapter 38 and chapter 44. I’ve got the links here and I’ll read the chapters for real later. Honest.

This chapter is a demonstration of the fallacy of proof by example. The form of this argument is:

1. x, a member of the set X, has the property P.
2. Therefore, all members of X have the property P.

For example,

1. The sheep that field is black.
2. Therefore, all sheep are black.

Hitchens has selected three examples: cargo cult religions of the South Pacific, Pentecostal huckster Marjoe Gortner, and Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints founder Joseph Smith. So, after pruning out his rhetoric, his argument seems to be:

1. Cargo cults, Pentecostalism and Mormonism are founded by crooks and, hence, man-made.
2. Therefore, all religions are founded by crooks and, hence, man-made.

Of course, Hitchens has his work cut out for him. Here he needs to examine every religion of the world in time and place and conclude that all of them meet this criteria. A single counterexample, one demonstration of a religion without a crooked founder would be sufficient (as would one white sheep, above). Such a counterexample is not needed, of course, as the argument itself is invalid in its own form.

Chapter 12: A Coda: How Religions End

Another short excursus, like his previously on the pig, that documents the rise and fall of the Millerites, a 19th-century messianic movement. Presumably we are moving toward the ending section of the book and his final arguments. Here we go!

Chapter 13: Does Religion Make People Behave Better?

Hitchens takes on Martin Luther King and Gandhi, with a nod to Rosa Parks and Abraham Lincoln , to assert that religious belief was not a necessary part of their great moral accomplishments.

In his first example, he hopes to show that Martin Luther King’s appeals to Christianity were nothing more than manipulative techniques. Those Biblical narratives could have been substituted with Greek myth, if that’s what we all learned on mother’s knee:

As it was, though, the ‘Good Book’ was the only point of reference that everybody had in common (175).

Untrue. Every American has common points of reference in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. We have stories and songs about liberty and equality that appeal to the Revolution and to the earlier Emancipation. And yet, King stuck with Biblical narrative the night before he died.

At no point did Dr. King–who was one photographed in a bookstore waiting calmly for a physician while the knife of a maniac was sticking stright out of his chest–even hint that those who injured and reviled him were to be threatened with any revenge or punishment, in this world or the next, save the consequences of their own brute selfishness and stupidity. And he even phrased that appeal more courteously than, in my humble opinion, its targets deserved. In no real as opposed to nominal sense, then, was he a Christian (176).

Again, Hitchens’s presentation of Christianity is selective and one-sided. He read far enough into the Gospels to get John the Baptist’s angry preaching, but not far enough to get to the Sermon on the Mount.

The cause of abolition served by Christians and freethinkers alike:

“When Dr. King took a stand on the steps of Mr. Lincoln’s memorial and changed history, he too adopted a position that had effectually been forced upon him. But he did so as a profound humanist and nobody could ever use this name to justify oppression or cruelty. He endures for that reason, and his legacy has very little to do with his professed theology. No supernatural force was required to make the case against racism” (180).

He proceeds to blame religion for slavery:

As far as I am aware, there is no country in the world today where slavery is still practiced where the justification of it is not derived from the Koran (181).

Hitchens is clearly incapable of using a brief Internet search to get a little background. The sex slave trade thrives in Thailand, which is majority Buddhist. The BBC reported a year ago on a slave labor scandal in a brick factory in officially atheist China.

As much as chapter 11 was an exercise in proof by example, chapter 13 is an exercise in the fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc. Because religion is present in oppressive cultures, religion has caused that oppression.This is an erroneous argument.

If religion is removed from the equation, does the oppression go away? In the Enlightenment myth, it does. Secular reasoning always leads people to brighter futures. The twentieth century bears witness to the contrary: even in the absence of religion, humanity is capable of great brutality.

In religion’s presence, though are we better off? I’m hesitant to push too far. There’s a slippery slope here in pushing for the support of religion on utilitarian grounds that it is beneficial for society to have. Where exactly to go with that I haven’t quite figured out. It bears more thinking. But, hey, my blog is the perfect place for an inchoate position. I’m not the one who published a book full of inchoate positions.

Blogging God is not Great, Chapters 9 and 10

Chapter 9: The Koran is Borrowed from Both Jewish and Christian Myths

“One must proceed in the same spirit of inquiry to what many believe is the last revelation,” namely, the Koran. Indeed, the “same spirit of inquiry” is followed, and the pattern of the previous two chapters is repeated. He cites only two texts. Most of the information he offers on the Koran could be found, impartially, in an encyclopedia article (e.g., it cannot be properly translated from Arabic). He repeats his anger at the fatwa on his friend Salman Rushdie and laments that no Cranmer can ever touch the Koran as he did the Bible.

To cite Dennis Ritchie’s forward to the UNIX Hater’s Handbook, “Like excrement, it contains enough undigested nuggets of nutrition to sustain life for some. But it is not a tasty pie: it reeks too much of contempt and of envy. Bon appetit!”

Chapter 10: The Tawdriness of the Miraculous and the Decline of Hell

Before beginning this chapter, I’ve looked ahead to the footnotes to see what’s to come. I’m already dreading it, as the only two notes are critical books on Mother Teresa, one of them is his own. That said, he can give details on any number of miracles in many religions and drops names like David Hume and quotes people like Trotsky, so the notes don’t tell all.

In not unusual fashion, Hitchens goes for the expected target: the resurrection of Jesus. He immediately refers to Bart Ehrman’s “most astonishing finding” that there are two endings to Mark’s resurrection story. Hitchens clearly has read Ehrman’s 2006 book Misquoting Jesus but fails to give any attention to textual scholarship. To Hitchens, this finding belongs only to the past year’s scholarship from Ehrman. There’s not a hint that the eminent Bruce Metzger published on this topic fifteen years earlier. Nor the fact that the discrepancy is noted between major writings like Irenaeus (ca. 150, lacking the addition) and Codex Alexandrinus (5th century, with the addition). Again, Hitchens fails to see that Christians have known the textual problem for centuries and yet the religion has not come tumbling down.

Critical nerdiness aside, Hitchens has some clarity in relating the process of Gospel-writing to his own experience in journalistic reporting, “I even read some stories in print under my own name which were not recognizable to me once the sub-editors had finished with them” (144, emphasis his). News regularly undergoes many editorial rounds before finalization and yet the integrity of the story is not drawn into question on those grounds. It took me a few minutes to notice that he’s gone all over the map without saying much against the miracle of the resurrection itself.

In one page he sweeps from a clear comment into UFOs, William of Ockham and vitriol for Mother Teresa. For several pages he recycles stories from his other book in which he rejects miracles attributed to Mother Teresa. She has an obsessive power over him that he can’t get out of.

Hitchens rightly points out that miracles are not simply “disturbances in the natural order,” but that they are favorable disturbances in the natural order. He goes on to remind us that Krakatoa, the 2005 Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina are not termed miracles because of their unfavorableness. He does move on to the worst of the worst, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, and their disgusting interpretations of the events. Hitchens says that “everything is already explained” when we remember that we live on an unstable planet with turbulent weather. Yes, that does explain why those things happened. What meterology and geology don’t supply is a voice about how to act when these things happen. Robertson and Falwell have their feeble response to “repent” in order to prevent future disasters. Plenty of religious, however, spoke for compassionate action that no weather reporter or news anchor had been able to do.

The argument from authority gets deserved criticism before Hitchens brings in a personal question with more emotional weight behind it than the rest of the book so far.

As one who has always been impress by the weight of history and culture, I do keep asking myself this question. Was it all in vain, then: the great struggle of the theologians and scholars, and the stupendous efforts of painters and architects and musicians to create something lasting and marvelous that would testify to the glory of god?

Not at all. It does not matter to me whether Homer was one person or many, or whether Shakespeare was a secret Catholic or a closet agnostic (150).

…

But there is a great deal to be learned and appreciated from the scrutiny of religion, and one often finds oneself standing atop the shoulders of distinguished writers and thinkers who were certainly one’s intellectual and sometimes even one’s moral superiors (151).

In a page far more tender than usual for Hitchens, he expresses wonder at Mozart’s music, as he is curious if it is heaven-sent. Hitchens closes on his strong suit: literature. He is a well-read man and an expressive writer. “There are days when I miss my old convictions as if they were an amputated limb” (153). As I remember from earlier in the book, I’m feeling sympathetic to a man who I strongly disagree with and who, at times, I just can’t stand.

That said, he has gone far off course of his argument against the miraculous and has said almost nothing about “the decline of hell” promised in the chapter title. He expresses wishful thinking that the reader’s faith has been so far undermined but, at the rate the argument is going, I’m not finding his work effective.

Blogging God is Not Great, Chapters 7 and 8

Chapter 7: Revelation: The Nightmare of the “Old” Testament

As Judaism, Christianity and Islam find foundations in the revelation to Moses, Christopher Hitchens opens this chapter at the Ten Commandments of Exodus 20. From these verses, “it would be harder to find an easier proof that religion is man-made.” His principal objections are:

1. God sounds like an ancient Near East tyrant (Exodus 20:2, 8-11).
2. The ethical commandments are self-evident (Exodus 20:13-16).
3. The final commandments (v. 17) include slaves and wives as a man’s property, showing this to be a culturally-bounded writing, not a teaching from an eternal God.

He blames poor exegesis of the covenant for the nineteenth-century claims on Palestine that are the source of so many present woes in the Middle East. Tyrrany is again the order of the day and Hitchens is again unaware of the past century’s work on suzerainty treaties in the Near East and the scholars who have developed theology from them.

He formally cites Sigmund Freud and Thomas Paine and Finkelstein and Silberman’s The Bible Unearthed. Again, Freud is invoked to re-iterate that religion is of fear: “too clearly derived from our own desire to escape from or survive death. This critique of wish-thinking is strong and unanswerable….” This, of course, is not true. Freud has certainly had his critics since 1939, including Hitchens’s beloved Karl Popper. A 2006 Newsweek article refers to Freud as “history’s most-debunked doctor.”

Would Hitchens read this blog, I would love to hear him answer:

1. Considering Freud’s lack of intellectual credibility, why does Hitchens continue to cling to his claims?
2. Given that we are inescapably prone to our fear of death, how else ought it be dealt with other than the intervention of a God?

Concerning Paine, who “has never been refuted since he wrote,” has a blockquote that hints at a rudimentary, eighteenth-century form of textual criticism. Certainly not refuted, but answered through the 1860 publication of Essays and Reviews and any number of Anglican and German Biblcal scholars. Hitchens offers no evidence that he has read or even heard of these two centuries of scholarship.

The only recent text he engages is Finkelstein and Silberman. I don’t disagree with his use of modern archeological methods in OT exegesis at all. I’d find his arguments more credible would he reference more twentieth and twenty-first century writers.

Hitchens exposes the problems of poor exegesis of the Old Testament, which are already well-documented. However, he blames the abuse of the text on the text itself, not on its abusers. I would shudder to think of how, based on this example, Hitchens would treat cases of domestic abuse.

Chapter 8: The “New” Testament Exceeds the Evil of the “Old” One

The bibliography of a book is it’s most important part, one friend of mine told me. He was right. Again looking at Hitchens’s references we have H. L. Mencken, C. S. Lewis and Bart Ehrman. From his selections, it’s clear that Hitchens’s understanding of Christianity is colored more by essayists, novelists and controversialists than it is by its own theologians and Biblical scholars.

And so the chapter begins. He opens with a character attack on Mel Gibson (“Australian fascist and ham actor,” who adheres “to a crackpot and schismatic Catholic sect”). He moves on to pointing out textual contradictions in the Gospels and questioning the canonization process in the light of Nag Hammadi. Textual problems have been evident since at least Tatian’s Diatessaron of A.D. 150. Christians of any sensibility have had time to acknowledge this, deal and respond.

About halfway into the chapter, Hitchens alludes to having read any recent scholarship:

The contradictions and illiteracies of the New Testament have filled up many books by eminent scholars, and have never been explained by any Christian authority except in the feeblest terms of “metaphor” and “Christ of faith.” This feebleness derives from the fact that until recently, Christians could simply burn or silence anybody who asked any inconvenient questions (115).

Of course, this explains why Thomas Jefferson suffered martyrdom at the hands of the church for his edited New Testament. And why Thomas Paine went into hiding for his deistic views. Or, it’s another one-sided argument from someone who can’t bother to footnote that he didn’t read H. Richard Niebuhr’s short book The Meaning of Revelation.

To his credit, he understands typological readings of the New Testament and correctly identifies the Immaculate Conception, a doctrine popularly misunderstood.

He picks C. S. Lewis’s popular “lunatic, liar, lord” rhetoric as his next target. Of course, Hitchens’s has moved from his topic (the text of the New Testament) and into christological apologetics. Hitchens is quite willing to choose “liar” and continue with his theme that the religion is itself immoral. It’s an interesting move that I haven’t heard anyone take up before.

Hitchens takes this opportunity to introduce Ehrman and the textual problem of John 8. There are plenty of problems around John 8 and Hitchens identifies a few. However, rather than turning to scholarly consensus, he picks New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman. And no one else.

Hitchens concludes that he has “again selected [his] source on the basis of ‘evidence against interest:’ in other words from someone whose original scholarly and intellectual journey was not at all intended to challege holy writ.” To the contrary, Hitchens intentionally chose Ehrman, a scholar of the same race and gender as he. They graduated from college within a few years of one another. Additionally, Ehrman has come out as agnostic in the last year. To say that the distinction between an atheist and an agostic is “evidence against interest” stretches his argument more than thin.

Anglican Diocese of Sydney ditching Microsoft

ZDNet Australia reports the Anglican Diocese of Sydney will purge its Microsoft products over the next three years. Tectonic carries a brief of the article.

The diocesan CIO George Lymbers had this to say:

Some people say, well you only need Windows. Wait a second: you need Office, you need Windows, you need this, you need that. Before you know it you have 10 to 12 licences on one PC covered across thousands of installations. The cost of that is just spectacular.

They are electing to go with IBM Lotus Symphony to replace Microsoft Office. Symphony is free to download but IBM is paid for support. It runs on Windows and the free Linux operating system, which can help ease the transition to totally free software.

The Sydney diocese will save about $150,000 annually by making the switch. Presumably, the savings will benefit the “schools, youth groups and aged care villages” whose computers will be switched.

I typically hold mixed feelings about the Sydney diocese, but this move is very much to their credit!