Marat

The infamous 'Thalidomidus rex,' I believe.

This sounds like an interesting book, but hasn't the essential philosophical groundwork of a renewed understanding of God for the modern world already been worked out some time ago by authors like Friedrich Schleiermacher, Ludwig Boltmann, Paul Tillich, and Carl Jung? Essentially, they decided that the old account of the nature of God was just too silly for words, so they tried to make it more respectable by extinguishing its preposterous physicality and anthropomorphism, and substituting for this a rather hyperinflated balloon filled with metaphysical implications. But since saving the God concept that way turned out to push it too close to atheism, theology has been in a bit of a quandry ever since. What I don't understand about those who follow the full historical development of the concept of God under all the contingent, empirical influences of Ancient Greek metaphysics, Roman Stoicism, Medieval Nominalism, Medieval Universalism, modern Existentialism, the Kerygma and Myth school, etc., is how they can take God seriously as a real and transcendent being when they can see that the concept of God is so much a product of the surrounding historical forces, none of which can claim to be transcendent truths rather than just varying currents of human opinion? It is as if a hundred monkeys typing for a million years by coindicence produced, among millions of pages of nonsense, one coherent page, and we were then to fall down on our knees and worship the message of that text as divine. "But we can see that it originated in pure contingency!" I shout from the sidelines, yet everyone continues worshipping it. For example, we know that historically the early Israelites were influenced by the monotheism developing in Ancient Egypt, and we can see that the Ancient Egyptian stories of Isis and Osiris are analogous to the Christ story, as are the Ancient Greek stories of the death and resurrection of various gods, such as Orpheus and Dionysus. We can also trace the various routes by which these ideas, plus the Ancient Greek idea of a soul persisting after death (cf. the Harpy Tomb), contributed to the mix of ideas in the Roman Province of Judea to produce the basis of modern Christianity. Yet while we dismiss Ancient Egyptian and Ancient Greek myths as ridiculous, we suddenly regard the product of their historical combination in Ancient Judea as the one true word of God and the one great miracle that opened the gates of Heaven for mankind. Since anyone with a knowledge of the historical influences operating in Ancient Judea at the time could reasonably have posited the emergence of something like modern Christian doctrine just from the purely natural, empirical, and contingent interaction of those intellectual historical forces, even had there been no divine intervention to produce the essential miracle of the one true resurrection of the one true God, why are we so sure that the accidental confluence of those intellectual historical influences is divine?

This whole line of thinking, based as it is on the assumption that we can reliably interpret antique texts as though they were modern statutes, seems absurd to me. There are three problems with this: 1) Any lawyer will tell you that a statute, a constitution, a common law principle cannot contain any secure meaning in itself, since words and texts are always quite finite in comparison with the enormous density of detail and variety in the real world. So comparing any written rule to the variety of situations in the real world and expecting a single, determinate, 'right' answer is extremely naive. Wittgenstein's philosophy of language supports the view of academic lawyers that all rules can only first claim to have any determinate meaning at all once they are framed in an interpretive context which narrows down all the divergent paths of potential interpretation. This interpretive context for modern laws is the judicial system, and its hermeneutic art of interpreting legal rules takes common law students three or four years of full-time study to learn, and appeals court judges will tell you they never stop learning how to construe the raw materials of the law faithfully to the intention of the authors of the statutes. It follows readily from this that God would never be so idiotic as to attempt to convey a determinate meaning just by setting up a system of Biblical rules, since those rules could never contain any meaning in themselves independently of an interpretive matrix for them to give them significance. But since the Bible does not clearly establish the interpretive matrix for its rules, the fact that it seems to think it has communicated something determinate just proves that it is the work of Bronze Age nomads who didn't understand anything about the modern philosophy of language, rather than the work of God himself. If the interpretive matrix is the 'Holy Spirit,' as some say, then its directives are so vague and disputable that it seems silly to fuss about the 'exact' meaning of the rules it interprets, since the ultimate exactitude of the message communicated is the product of the clarity of the rules multiplied times the clarity of the interpretive matrix, which is not clear at all. If the matrix is each person's insight (Martin Luther et seq.), then the vagueness problem only gets worse, so we have to wonder why there is a text in the first place to start the personal, subjective reflection going, since the subjectivity quickly becomes limitless. (Look at all the different messages derived from the Bible: e.g., the Shaker Communities, the Seventh Day Adventists, the Quakers, the Roman Catholics, etc.) 2) Any ancient text is invariably corrupt after a few centuries, and God must have known that this would happen with his message, so why was he so silly as to rely so heavily on the message -- per impossibile -- being transmitted without corruption? Not only is text miscopied, mistranslated, and misunderstood over time (Michelangelo's statue of Moses has horns because the radiance over his head was mistranslated as horns on his head during the Renaissance, for example), but whole sections are lost or added for purely contingent political and historical reasons at the various early Church Councils. (If Bishop Hippo of Alexandria wants a given book included in the Bible and he already has too much political influence, that book is defined as heretical and dropped, etc.) 3) Even worse is the problem of the radical indeterminacy of translation as described first by Willard Quine in 1969. It states that words and languages can only really be understood by those who also share the entire belief system of those using them, since otherwise each term in the language will lack the full set of resonances that inform its meaning for the person using it. In this sense all translation, even if technically accurate, is a falsification. Thus in a world where alchemy is accepted as a valid part of science, the words 'gold' and 'lead' cannot possibly mean the same thing as they do for us, since the original speakers thought of these substances as states of matter which could be changed into each other by chemical process (something like ice and water for us). Sure, we can translate the words 'gold' and 'lead' correctly in the sense of matching them up with our modern words, but this hides rather than reveals the ultimate meaning. Things get even worse when we get into philosophical and moral terms such as are vital for the Bible. For example, since Aristotle believed that it was perfectly moral to have slaves, what did he mean when he used the Greek word that we translate as 'humane'? In a sense we can find a translation for this, but we can't really understand that word as Aristotle did, i.e., in such a way that you could seriously regard yourself as humane and yet still accept slavery. The same problems apply to the Bible, so an infinitely wise God would not have been so naive as to have thought that he really could have provided a continuing source of the same meaning via language from one historical era and belief world to the next, as he appears to have attempted by having given his message once and for all in the Bible at a given time in history. This proves once again that the Bible was written by Bronze Age nomads rather than by an infinite intellect, which would have been more linguistically sophisticated. So if God wanted to communicate a message reliably to us, he would have had to do so in some metaphysically imaginative way to overcome all these problems. For example, there might have been some inner intuition of God's message available from birth to everyone's mind but visible to the intellect only if it adopted the properly moral orientation. But since there isn't, the message will always be turned to hash by all the contingencies of the empirical world detailed above.

Obviously people experience their wealth or poverty, and exercise their capacity for political influence, as individuals rather than as members of a class. Thus the whole point of the redistribution of wealth is to ensure that society achieves the greatest good for the greatest number by distributing it so that the most vital basic needs of each person are fulfilled before any demands for luxury are met. The reason for this is simple: Answering the most basic human needs produces vastly more happiness per dollar spent than does satisfying the demand for luxuries, so if we truly care about other humans and regard the need of all people for happiness as equal, we have to use the available resources to produce the greatest happiness for the greatest number by answering basic needs prior to luxuries. Class influence similarly has to be measured per capita rather than by the total capital available to the class. Thus a massive army of people living at the subsistence level, who have to spend all their available time and energy scratching to eke out a living, have neither the surplus time nor the extra money to exercise any political influence at all, no matter how much time and money their entire class has in sum. In contrast, each wealthy individual can satisfy his own basic needs with less than 1% of his time and money, so he has the remaining 99% plus left over for political influence. Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and various other billionaires are invited to the White House to give their advice, but the poor and the middle class are not.

Then what do you think of present feminist theories which suggest that a woman is simply exploited by others if she assumes the traditional supportive and nurturing role of women, and that she should instead be as competitive, self-assertive, and self-centered as the traditional negative image of the alpha-male if she wants to be truly liberated?

It has to matter to both religious and non-religious people whether God is just a creature of the imagination or not. For the religious, if it is an imaginative artifact, then while it may be a useful organizing principle to orient thinking about the world, it is ultimately just a hypothesis, an unproven 'what if' which provides no assurance that that orientation is valid. For the non-religious, proving to everyone that God is just a feature of the imagination is important for ensuring that society does not pass foolish laws against assisted suicide, free access to abortion, sexual freedom, etc., based on the superstitions associated with the supposed reality of a being whose bare existence settles arguments about social policy.

I think both sides have a practical interest in converting the other side to its position. The believers want to save souls and the atheists want to live in a society with rational people.

Perhaps the desire to be passively pleasured with no active pursuit of pleasure is the goal of both sexes. Just consider the 'Orgasmatron' of Woody Allen's movie, 'Sleeper.'

It is also important to ask why it is that top-level universities seem to continue to produce top-level scientists. Since in theory the same information is available to almost everyone almost anywhere in the world, even to someone not in university but just near a good university library, why is being at an excellent university important to your own potential for self-development? Having studied and taught at both excellent and average universities, I can say that part of your performance depends on the atmosphere and expectations around you. If you're at Harvard and every Fall you hear all the college bell-towers ringing to celebrate yet another Nobel Prize winner at the university, you feel a lot more inspired to do your best than if you are at the University of Vienna, where the instruction labs are indistinguishable from the history of science displays.

Don Knotts vs. Al Gore: either extreme is regarded unfavorably.

And what made the oceanic dinosaurs so much more sensitive to the sudden and massive environmental change than the other oceanic creatures which did survive this boundary?

Simvastatin is one of the easiest drugs in medicine to dose properly: 0 mg/day. If you want to treat hypercholesterolemia without destroying the patient's musculature, Niaspan is a far better option, as long as the liver enzymes are all right.

All ontological distinctions are arbitrary. We could say that everyone with an IQ less than 20 is not a human being, or that any person in a persistent vegetative state is not human, or that a fetus is not a human being until it is born alive. All three statements just set up an arbitrary, bright-line division for purposes of legal and ethical simplicity, but each has some biological factors in its favor and some against if you are assessing its claim to distinguish what is 'really' human from what is not. The utimate point is that biology only provides us with factors which you can variously weigh as you wish, but it can't give definitive answers about where we choose to draw the limits of the names we give things. There is a general trend of associating more liberal attributions of humanness with more progressive social policy. The Nazis had not only a euthanasia program but also wanted to deny full human status to Jews, so they were ontologically conservative with respect to their definition of the group carrying full human status. However, recently progressives have also tended to become ontologically conservative with respect to attributing humanness, and they want to deny it to fetuses and people in vegetative states on the theory that these attributions limit the achievement of greater social goods. As your politics goes, so goes your ontology.

In Germany the situation varies by 'Land' or province, and when I was in Berlin, the initial settling-in requirements were so extensive that the Land officials allowed only part of them to be completed by foreign students on first arrival, with the rest to be completed later. I was in Germany from 1984 to 1990, however, so things are no doubt different by now.

The general goal of wealth redistribution is to ensure the satisfaction of basic needs before the satisfaction of any demands for luxuries. Since keeping warm is a basic human need, I would hope that in the future socialist paradise, we would all be able to keep warm and afford enough light to read, even at night, albeit at the cost of not being able to manufacture Jaguars or build mansions in Hollywood anymore.

You reject the mythologization of God as a quasi-human entity such as Zeus or Jehovah, which you regard as not based in nature, but then you go on to commit your own mythologization of God as an entity separate from the rest of the universe but somehow still creating and controlling it. This reification of the power of the universe as implying that the universe is sustained by some thing existing outside of it and holding this power as a characteristic of itself is the very essence of mythologizing. A true liberation from mythologizing tendencies, a true return to basing things in nature, as you say you want to do, would be to say that there is power and creativity represented in the ordinary physical universe, and that that power and creativity resides in the physical world, rather than residing in, or implying the existence of, anything outside the universe which then 'gives' it these predicates of power and creativity.

I believe the theologically correct answer is that the souls of the countless fertilized embyos that are flushed down the toilet unnoticed by anyone go to Limbo, where nothing good or bad happens to them, beyond having to bend over backwards to dance under a bar. A more interesting question is why Christians who are obsessed with abortion being murder seem to show absolutely no interest whatsoever in preventing the largest single cause of human death today -- according to the way they interpret human life -- which is the spontaneous detachment of fertilized embryos from the uterus? Why doesn't medical science make saving these 'human lives' its top priority? Why isn't the number of these deaths listed in any table of mortality as the largest single cause of the loss of human life? For some reason we only seem to care about these entities or regard them as living humans when they are aborted, not when they die by accident.

I'm not sure if I understand your thesis. Are you suggesting that the excess concentration of wealth among the richest people makes others feel poorer than they should by comparison with the standards set by the prominence of the wealthy? This could create an artificial sensation of widespread decline in prosperity just because the relative prosperity of those in the middle and lower classes was lower compared to the wealthy than had historically been the case. Some data to measure this are: In 1985, the richest 5% of Americans controlled assets worth 2.05 times the GDP. In 2010, the richest 5% of Americans controlled assets worth 2.74 times the GDP, about a third higher concentration of wealth at the top than a generation ago. The GINI index of income inequality in the United States at various periods shows this same trend (perfect equality of incomes throughout the society would yield an index number of 0.0, perfect inequality 1.00): 1968: .39 1980: .40 1990: .43 2009: .47 The real question has to be, why does the population consistently vote for policies which worsen the maldistribution of wealth?

There are interesting cases of people born blind who were then later restored to sight by an operation on the optic nerve. Some of these people, like the famous blind geometer of the late 18th century, Cheselton, were able to do geometry quite well while blind, but upon being restored to sight could not tell the difference between simple geometric models without touching them. This makes you wonder how they were constructing a logical model of geometrical relations in their mind, which somehow allowed them to extract inferences from it such as can be detected by sight in people who are not blind, yet without having any experience with vision. (They also reveal other interesting dissonances between the assumptions of the blind and the sighted, such as the fact that blind people assume that a 'quarter moon' is a quarter like a quarter of a pie, which they know by touch, rather than what the sighted know it to be.) Gregory, 'Eye and Brain,' has a lot of interesting information on this topic.

What about the live coelacanth, of a species thought to have been extinct since the late Cretacean Period, which was caught off the coast of South Africa in 1938?

I agree that it is possible to get around in a foreign environment; I've spent more than half my life living outside of my home country, and have taught in three countries outside the one where I grew up. My point was simply that you have to expect there to be some unexpected inconveniences adjusting to any foreign culture, so since you will already have your hands full with adjusting to the stresses of graduate work, it is best to ensure that you have already mastered the skills of living in a foreign country before school starts. There are also even more challenging problems in adjusting to the internal culture of foreign universities, which is often different in unexpected ways from your experience. Thus for example, when I first began studying medicine in Germany, I thought the students were simply foolish to be copying down every single word the professor said in each lab introduction and to be laboriously transcribing every little detail he wrote on the blackboard when introducing the labs, while yet failing to pay any attention at all during the regular lectures. Also, they seemed foolishly to ignore the recommended textbooks, and to spend way too much time memorizing every minor aspect of the labs. It was only when I got to my first final exam that I was suddenly shocked to learn that Germans make the surreal assumption that an adequate examination of a subject consists in asking questions ONLY about the labs while asking nothing whatsoever about the general principles of the subject. Even though I had read standard German guidebooks about medical studies before that, what I did not appreciate was that these guidebooks only explained what Germans would not automatically assume, which did not include the generally understood rule that exams were only about labs -- which was simply too well known to count as something worth explaining.

Believe me, the economies imposed on everyday existence by the high price of energy can be exhausting. I once lived in an apartment in Vienna where the entire hot water supply was contained in a barrel bolted to the ceiling above the bathtub. If you tried to use more hot water than that barrel could hold, then you were out of luck. Among other things, you couldn't expect to bathe and wash the dishes on the same day. And then there is the nighmare of Nachtspeicherheizung, the need to anticipate the next day's heating needs by setting a meter to draw heat the night before during the cheap rates; or in England, three-wheeled car/bicycle hybrids roaring along the street at 12 mph; or motorized mattresses called 'floats' delivering the milk because no one could afford the fuel for a genuine truck; or horse-drawn wagons carrying coal to heat houses in the middle of a modern metropolis like Vienna; or rows of students holding onto the pipes along the walls in the Cambridge University Library to keep warm with help of the feeble temperature elevation provided; or people taking for granted that you have to wear a coat all the time indoors in the winter; or aged and anemic patients dying every year in the hospitals from hypothermia ... I could go on, but these memories are just too depressing.

Kinsey (or was it Masters and Johnson?) conducted experiments with 'susceptible' women and found that they could have any number of orgasms in a row; the experiment was stopped at around 100. An objective indication that something physically real is happening in female orgasm has been recorded with a mini camera that shows internal convulsions occurring when women report feeling an orgasm.

One problem with foreign graduate study is that while the U.S. often extends special help to foreign students on the theory that they have fewer financial resources than American students do, most foreign countries assume that domestic scholarships, grants, fellowships, teaching assistantships, and perks of all kinds should be reserved for their own nationals, who generally do have less disposable income. Another issue to consider is that foreign countries all have their own unique educational systems which make a number of arbitrary assumptions that an American student will not be familiar with. You might not understand the importance or the nature of tutorials or the college system if you are an American going to England, or you might be surprised at the need to register with the police and get health insurance before you can matriculate at the university if you go to Germany. In almost all continental European countries, you will be amazed at how vital a high school diploma, produced in the original, is, when no U.S. grad school would care about it. A final disadvantage is that the rituals and networking structure for propelling you from getting your Ph.D./M.D. to an academic position are often quite different abroad than they are in the U.S., and often the system abroad simply won't link up with the jobs available in the U.S. You may then decide to stay in Europe, where life is in some ways better, though there are other assumptions of everyday life which will be startling to an American. (E.g., in Germany you can only name your children with a name from a government list of approved names; you can't leave or enter a new town to live there without registering with the police; you must carry ID with you if you go near a political demonstration, etc.) These cultural dissonances take a while to adjust to, so if you plan to study abroad make sure that you go three or four months in advance to acclimatize yourself first. When you are in the midst of all the pressure of doing your graduate work you don't want to have to deal with the surprise that, for example, in Italy you cannot buy postage stamps at the post office, but only at a tobacco store (?!), or that you cannot pay any government fees in cash at a government office in Austria, but you must first buy stamps at a store to pay for these petty transactions, etc.

Although credit does in a sense create a kind of 'fake wealth' because there is always more buying power available in society than there is 'real wealth' (gold, for example), to back it up, in fact this has been the case ever since Italian city-states in the Renaissance started relying on banks loaning money at interest to promote the revival of trade and commerce. The inflation of wealth by credit is a good thing, as evidenced by what happens when the confidence that sustains credit collapses in recessions and depressions. There was just as much 'real wealth' in the aftermath of the 1929 Market Crash as before, in the sense that there were still the same number of factories, machine-tools, coal mines, and skilled workers as before, but the Great Depression was the result ot the disappearance of the 'fake wealth' of credit -- that is, the willingness of people to loan money for business ventures on the expectation that these ventures would generate sufficient income to repay the loans. Market crashes occur when people start calling in the real assets to back up loans which have been given, that is, when they lose confidence in the 'fake wealth' of credit and become willing to accept only the 'real wealth' of tangible assets. Prosperity flourishes when people buy stocks on margin, banks loan more money than they actually have on deposit, governments print more money than they actually have in their treasuries, etc., because then we have more capacity to stimulate growth than our limited supply of surplus tangible assets.