jrosenhouse | October 9, 2011This is the first in what will be an occasional series about some of my favorite short stories. These are the sorts of stories that remind me of what I aspire to as a writer. They are the ones I enjoy partly for their engaging plot lines, and partly for the skillfulness of the writing itself. The ones I go back and reread periodically even though I've already memorized most of the dialogue. They have given me so much satisfaction over the years that I feel compelled to share them with everyone else.
This first entry addresses my very favorite short story of all time: “The Problem of Cell…
jrosenhouse | October 8, 2011The latest issue of Free Inquiry magazine turned up in the mail this week. Lots of interesting material, as always. One article that caught my eye was “Building on a Religious Background,” by C. L. Hanson. Hanson grew up as a Mormon, but is now an atheist. She currently lives in Switzerland and has a blog.
Hanson writes:
One of the most important lessons I've learned is that a single claim can seem either obviously crazy or perfectly reasonable, depending on how you have been exposed to it. Consider the Mormon belief that God was once a human and that humans can become gods. As a…
jrosenhouse | October 7, 2011The brou ha ha over original sin continues apace. Andres Sullivan has replied to Jerry Coyne. It's a very bad post, arrogant but contentless. Jerry has already delivered the well-deserved spanking.
Sullivan uncorks nuggets like this:
I would argue that original sin is a mystery that makes sense of our species' predicament - not a literal account of a temporal moment when we were all angels and a single act that made us all beasts. We are beasts with the moral imagination of angels. But if we are beasts, then where did that moral imagination come from? If it is coterminous with…
jrosenhouse | October 6, 2011The big original sin debate goes on. Ross Douthat has weighed in, as has Andrew Sullivan in this post. Both gentleman go after Jerry Coyne. Jerry has already stolen some of my thunder by replying himself (here and here.) He's a much more efficient blogger than I am. Still, I'll throw in my two cents.
Douthat writes:
Shea touched off the dust-up by arguing that there's nothing particularly radical, at least from the perspective of the Catholic tradition, about interpreting the first books of Genesis as a “figurative” account of a primeval event, rather than as literal historiography that…
jrosenhouse | September 28, 2011I'm pathetically excited about this:
The last we heard of the troubled and mystical Danny Torrance, he had just conquered the malicious Overlook Hotel, losing his father, Jack, along the way. Over thirty years later, his story will be continued via Stephen King's sequel to The Shining, titled Doctor Sleep.
I've been a big Stephen King fan ever since high school. The shine has come off a bit with his recent novels, but I still read them as quickly as King can publish them. The Shining is one of my all time favorites.
The sequel's plot? Young Danny is all grown up and uses his powers to…
jrosenhouse | September 26, 2011Forthcoming from Oxford University Press:
The book is partly a memoir of my experiences at various creationist conferences, partly an exploration of creationist thought and argumentation, and partly a broader discussion of issues related to science and religion. I'm pretty happy with how it came out, so hopefully readers will enjoy it.
jrosenhouse | September 25, 2011Huffington Post has a short article up about the phenomenon of Jews who don't believe in God. Turns out there are a lot of us:
Atheism is entrenched in American Judaism. In researching their book American Grace, authors Robert Putnam and David Campbell found that half of all American Jews doubt God's existence. In other groups, that number is between 10 and 15 percent.
Those figures have some in the Jewish community alarmed. A recent issue of Moment, a magazine of Jewish thought, asked influential Jews if Judaism can survive without God. The answers were split.
Half? Goodness! That's a…
jrosenhouse | September 23, 2011I am not now, nor have I ever been, married. Most of the time I like being single, but I do have my moments of weakness. They're infrequent and don't usually last long, but every once in a while, if I squint a bit and tilt my head just so, I can just see the appeal of marriage. On the other hand, I figure most married people have moments when they wish they were single, so it probably all evens out in the end.
I also do not have children, but it simply never happens that I wish that I did. I am at an age (38) where a majority of my friends have young children, but whenever I see them…
jrosenhouse | September 14, 2011Picking up where yesterday's post left off, we have one more point to consider. Recall that the set-up here is that Edward Feser suggested a reinterpretation of the Adam and Eve story to bring it into line with modern genetics. In particular, Feser's scenario hypothesizes that Adam and Eve were selected from a population of hominids to receive the gift of an eternal soul. Those other hominids were biologically human, but since they lacked souls they were not metaphysically human. I replied in this post. Feser then replied to my reply here.
In yesterday's post I discussed two objections…
jrosenhouse | September 13, 2011Edward Feser has posted a reply to my previous post about original sin. I shall reply in two posts, but that will be it from my side. If Feser wants to reply to these posts then he can have the last word.
The problem is this: Several lines of evidence tell us that there was never a time when the human population was exactly two. It also tells us that humanity is one endpoint of billions of years evolution by natural selection. This conflicts with religious accounts holding that Adam and Eve were created instantaneously and were the only humans on the planet at that time. Thus, if we…
jrosenhouse | September 12, 2011New York mayor Michael Bloomberg decided not to include any religious clerics among the speakers at the 9/11 memorial service this weekend. Unsurprisingly, this caused some controversy:
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has come under attack by some religious and political leaders for not including clergy members as speakers at Sunday's official ceremony at ground zero on the 10th anniversary of the attacks.
Richard D. Land, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, which is the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, said in an interview that the planned ceremony…
jrosenhouse | September 9, 2011Jerry Coyne weighs in with a few thoughts about the various attempts, considered in my last post, to preserve the notion of original sin in the light of modern science. It turns out he's even less impressed by those attempts than I am. Go have a look!
Since Wednesday's post was already quite long, I didn't get around to mentioning one additional attempt to promote an evolutionary understanding of original sin. It comes from theologian John Haught. In his book God After Darwin he writes:
What, then, might original sin mean? Superficially, it means a systematic turning away from God by…
jrosenhouse | September 7, 2011One of the many problems modern science poses for Christianity is the question of how to understand original sin. The traditional teaching, which holds that Adam and Eve were the only humans on the planet when they were created on day six of Creation Week, that the ground was cursed and they were expelled from Eden as a result of a specific sin they committed, and that this corrupted state was in some way passed down to all future human beings, is no longer tenable. A variety of lines of evidence make it clear that the human population has always numbered in the thousands and certainly…
jrosenhouse | August 30, 2011I will not be actively supporting Obama's reelection next year. I will not donate money to his campaign. I will not even put a sign on my lawn. In the end I will vote for him, but only because to do otherwise would be to reward the Republicans for their appalling and unpatriotic behavior over the last four years. And if Obama loses next year to some Republican lunatic, I won't be shedding any tears for him.
I am hardly the first liberal to notice that, after a few decent legislative accomplishments early in his term, it's been one betrayal after another from our supposedly progressive…
jrosenhouse | August 29, 2011The Humanist has posted a fascinating interview with Leo Behe, son of ID luminary Michael Behe. The younger Behe does not share his father's faith, and has become outspoken about his lack of belief. That takes some courage, given his upbringing:
The Humanist: Talk about your early life and education.
Leo Behe: I was homeschooled from preschool through high school. I still had my share of friends, but I personally feel that the means through which I selected them (networking with other local homeschoolers) significantly limited the diversity that most children experience through interaction…
jrosenhouse | August 23, 2011From the department of self-promotion, let me call attention to the current volume of The Electronic Journal of Combinatorics. If you click on the link and scroll down to P164, you will find a barn-burning, rhetorical masterpiece of a paper entitled, “Isoperimetric Numbers of Regular Graphs of High Degree With Applications to Arithmetic Riemann Surfaces.” And who wrote this paper, you ask, the suspense practically killing you? That would be my long time friend and collaborator Dominic Lanphier, of Western Kentucky University, along with yours truly. Yay! Always nice to have one more line…
jrosenhouse | August 22, 2011One upside to my recent convalescence has been that I have had plenty of time for reading. Currently I'm working my way through Graham Oppy's book Philosophical Perspectives on Infinity, published by Cambridge University Press in 2006. Oppy is best known as a philosopher of religion, writing from a generally atheistic perspective. His book Arguing About Gods is really excellent, thought it definitely does not make for light reading.
As for the present book, I'm only through the first two chapters so far. I think I'm going to like the rest, though, since the preface contains remarks like…
jrosenhouse | August 16, 2011A number of years ago I attended an ID conference near Kansas City. One of the breakout sessions featured a fellow from the Heritage Foundation (an ultra-right-wing political think tank) presenting a lecture about probability and evolution. His talk was mostly just a watered-down version of William Dembski's standard talking points. His triumphant conclusion was that the probability of something or other having evolved by natural processes was one over something enormous, from which he concluded that evolution had been refuted.
There were only about fifteen of us in the room. During the…
jrosenhouse | August 15, 2011In his latest HuffPo piece, Karl Giberson writes:
The story of Adam and Eve originated as a Hebrew oral tradition, which is a long ways from an English prose translation. And there are more complex filters related to culture, author intent, literary form, historical setting, anticipated audience and so on.
Application of these filters leads many readers to conclude that the biblical story of Adam and Eve was never intended to be read as literal history. The world “Adam” for example, is the generic Hebrew word for “man.” “Eve” means “living one.” The story is about a couple with the…
jrosenhouse | August 10, 2011Sorry for the disappearing act. I've been using this time to better myself by learning about new things. Like the various causes of sciatica. Or where you go in Harrisonburg when you need to have your back X-rayed. Turns out I have a degenerate disc in my lower back. When you consider that there are far nastier things that can cause low back pain, this is actually decent news. Happily, through a combination of lots of rest and some anti-inflammatory medication the symptoms have largely abated, and my doctor is optimistic that things will return to normal fairly soon. Since I was…