The Plan Is Launched

Excellent!

This past weekend, I was elected to the Executive Board of my local parent-teacher organization. The group supports enrichment programs for students, runs events to encourage parental involvement, and keep lines of communication going between parents and teachers.

I am grateful for the chance to be a voice for quality educational programs and standards. As the parent of an autistic child, I will represent many more who want the system to reach out to their children too. Finally, the participation and networking will help me gain local notoriety as I work toward future involvement in the town's school committee and board of selectmen.

Summer Reading

Among my goals for the summertime is to read and finish several books. In no particular order, here are the ones I most want to tackle:

1. How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clay Christensen et al. A book on principles of success in business, ethics, and life from a highly regarded Harvard Business School lecturer.
2. The Art of Strategy by Avinash Dixit and Barry Nalebuff. Game Theory in real life.
3. Britain BC by Francis Pryor. An expert surveys what we know about ancient Britain and Ireland.
4. Sublime Dreams of Living Machines by Minsoo Kang. A scholarly account of the automaton in the Western imagination.
5. The Information by James Gleick. The story of Information Theory.
6. Good and Real by Gary Drescher. Reconciling a mechanical view of the world with observations and issues in physics, ethics, and more. 
7. The Obligation toward the Difficult Whole by Brian McHale. A former instructor of mine on postmodernist long poems.
8. Morte d'Arthur by Thomas Malory. King Arthur's life, court, and death.
9. Paterson by William Carlos Williams. A book-length poem on Paterson, New Jersey.
10. Retrieving the Ancients: An Introduction to Greek Philosophy by David Roochnik. More than just Plato and Aristotle.

Dear Believers: Embrace Your Doubts

No gurus.

You like your religious beliefs and your religion. You like the stories--most of them, anyway--in the holy texts. You admire the central characters. You enjoy hearing and singing the devotional songs. You have a nice time at your place of worship, and the people there are very nice. You relate to them. You know the clergyman is pretty smart. He explains so clearly where the religious doctrines come from, and how they apply to the live we lead today. It is amazing, that the wisdom of old can resonate with each one of us. What's more, the sayings and the stories apply differently to such a variety of situations.

But you also have doubts. You pray, and you believe, but you have a twinge. How is God actually working in your life, how does that happen? When you look at your life, at the day by day of it, at the way the world works, how is it that God is so absent?

You have doubts. You wonder whether the religion's doctrines on gods and heaven and sins...are wrong. Maybe God didn't send Joseph down to Egypt or speak to Israel at Sinai or grant them victory over Jericho. Maybe Jesus wasn't the Son of God or the savior of humanity's sins or the conqueror of death. Maybe Mohammed wasn't a prophet. Maybe Joseph Smith made a mistake. Maybe Paul of Tarsus was a zealot. Maybe L. Ron Hubbard was only kidding. Maybe Mary was a regular mother.

My message to you, believers, is to embrace your doubts. I am not saying you should become an agnostic or an atheist. I am not saying to doubt everything or to believe everything. That's not at all what I want. Instead, I want for you to accept that it is right and good to have doubts. It is right and good to explore them, to understand them, to seek answers to them from various sources.  It's not a bad thing to enjoy doubt because doubt helps you to look for more information, and the more you look the more you will see.

I'm saying it's OK that your religion does not have all the answers, and I'm saying that your life is fine. Life can be a struggle. It can be unfair. It can be maddening. It can be lonely. It can be scary. Your life has all sorts of stresses, setbacks, and sonofabitches.

But your life also has greatness. It has you, first of all. You're pretty neat. It has a sun, a sky, and stars. It has the most amazing animal and plants all around. It has color, sound, and texture. It has friendly people, wacky people, kind people, generous people, smart people, and super people. Your life has its own story and possibilities. Your life has love, laughter, interest, music, value, potential, significance, and consequence. It has all these things, just by virtue that you are here.

Embrace your doubts. Don't think that doubts are bad or shameful. Don't be afraid or embarrassed about them. Don't ignore them, but explore them.

Investigate your unbelief as much as you have investigated your belief. Give yourself permission to follow every question.

Dear believers, this is my message. What is yours?

Birthday Lesson: All In

For the past two years I have used my birthday to reflect on life lessons. I have no lessons this time. My 42nd year was trying in a number of ways. That's not to say it was a bad year or a troubling year, but I was very busy and often stressed. Although many great things happened this year, I can't say I fully enjoyed myself as much and as often as I should have.

I know the reasons for this. I have taken on too many activities and responsibilities. I have divided my thoughts and emotions into excessively small portions. It may not be that I'm doing too much but rather that when I do anything I need to be more present and engaged.

So, there is a lesson: full immersion; all in. Here's to being there in my 43rd year.

Religion and Smallness

Checking in from dissertation land. As I get into the work, I tense up at how great the labor is, and how small I am before it. It's a multi-colored mountain of junk, trinkets, nuggets, knick-knacks, gems, and rotting fruit all piled higher than Babel. And I stand in front of it with slacked shoulders and bent knees, grabbing an item here to make a sort, walking around there to something else for a different sort. To say I'm daunted is way beneath understatement.

But continue on, I do. So Yoda has instructed.

My leisure thoughts turn to reflecting on 2011. My birthday approaches and I want to clarify one or two truths I've pulled from that other Babel pile, my life. More than anything else, the year was demanding. If last year I appealed to myself and to the blogosphere for peace, perhaps I sensed my desire to be--or at least feel--less put upon.

Didn't happen.

I was needed. My family needed my presence and engagement. My ambitions demanded my time and my mind. My work had its requirements, too.

Life is a wave passing by the center of the ocean, as far away from land as one can be. It has a force that I can't resist. I don't think anyone can. Some lucky folks keep their balance as the force moves them in the wave's direction. Some struggle in the sea for equilibrium. Others rotate around and around, unable to stop what the rushing wave caused for them.

In this image, I finally see what religion and religious experience really are. I don't mean the political religion of the popes and pastors and rabbis and mullahs and masters. I mean the private religion of people such as those I knew in my Chabad days and those I met at Alpha. I mean the faith of individual men and women trying to adjust to the wave.

Yes, religion involves community and stability. Yes, it feeds on family togetherness. Yes, it declares the believer's trust in what admired elders and righteous ancestors have openly, publicly shared. And yes, it helps one feel more certain that she is doing right.

These are all symptoms of a more basic awareness: that one is small and alone. When we get sick or scared, the awareness re-emerges. What drives religion more than anything else? What's the source of religion's symptoms and political fingerprints? It's not quite fear, as Bertrand Russell concluded, but both understanding the basic human situation and instinctively reacting to it.

It's a process. One slowly comes to grips with his smallness and solitude. One performs being small and alone, and one conjures a figure for the bigness and everythingness of the passing wave. One deals with oblivion by doing something, anything. It's something meaningless and pointless, but it orients one and directs his desire.

That's religion. Doing something for a release and for a wish. It might look like floating, or swimming, or surfing, or drowning. It might look like fun or fear or deference. But it's actually futility playing futility, an actor playing the part of herself. It's an undercover cop who actually is corrupt.

This is not a criticism of religion. How could it be?

How I'm Writing the Dissertation

People may be interested to know how I intend to go about writing my dissertation this year. My topic is medieval English literature, and I will write a software program to do a special sort of parsing for several texts in the corpus. I have three different types of parsing I want to do, and most of the dissertation will concern recording and analyzing the results generated by the program.

The project is pretty exciting, which is not an unimportant point because one reason I didn't finish my first dissertation back in 2001 was that I fell out of love with the topic. Back then, I had written two decent chapters but couldn't do the research or find a focus for the remaining chapters. My prospectus and plan were hardly helpful and I eventually had to resign myself to the idea that the project was untenable.

As I see it, once the software program is sufficiently developed, the dissertation itself should be relatively easy to complete. Of course, herein lies the major technical challenge: my ability to write the program. Software developing has been much more difficult than I imagined, but I'm working it. My hope is to have the program ready for trial by the end of this month or middle of next month.

Another challenge is my lifestyle. After all, I am a professional with a full-time salaried position. I'm not a graduate student with a few classes to teach and chunks of time that can be dedicated to library work and writing. I also have a household to care for, which means my family and my home. My kids want attention from me. My wife needs me to help out around the house. Bills need to be paid, errands need to be run, neighbors and friends need to be connected with. Finally, I need to manage my health and fitness.

Given my technical and time constraints, here is how I have game-planned the dissertation:

• At least 15 minutes per day learning and doing software development.
• At least 15 minutes per day planning dissertation content.

Fifteen minutes may not sound like a lot of time, but it can be. Besides, I often work for much longer than that. The main thing is to dedicate some time every day to being productive on the main elements of the project. In this way, I'm approaching the project similarly to how I conduct an exercise program or business project.

Indeed, the formal 15 minutes are "executive sessions" and not necessarily the execution work of programming or writing. These execution activities can take place throughout the day, even while I'm at my day job. Although I am at work during the day and have a full schedule of meetings and tasks, I also have pockets of time where I can focus exclusively on some part of the dissertation. What's more, I often have opportunities to work the dissertation as part of a multi-task scenario. In fact, that's how I blog as much as I do. Beyond the execution work, the 15-minute executive sessions will allow me to develop and refine the big picture of the dissertation, its important arguments, lines of support and evidence, critical background and objections, and paths forward.

The innovation (for me) of my approach lies in how I'll actually write the chapters. In short: I won't write. Instead, I am going to spend most of my time, at least in the early stage, using a storyboard process. Storyboarding is a technique I use in my job to help our technical teams develop proposal content. It's like a very robust outline that accounts for what information customers have asked for, what knowledge we bring to the subject, and what features and benefits distinguish our offering from other companies competing for the same business.

The advantage of storyboarding for the dissertation is that it allows for capturing a lot of data in individual sections while also making it possible to find places in the large-scale outline for new information and arguments. My dissertation writing plan, to make it basic, is to storyboard the dissertation so completely that it's practically written when I put everything together.

I have a high degree of confidence in this process because I've used it dozens of times at work. Nevertheless, it doesn't make completing the dissertation any easier or less labor intensive. But it will help me work on all of the dissertation instead of on individual chapters in sequence.

I'm excited about the project and about how I intend to conduct it. All that's left is to do it!

Moar on Moral Relativism

I continue to take a beating on my defense of moral relativism. Initially, the main purpose of my defense was to make only one claim:

To acknowledge cultural conditioning in morality does not prevent one from judging specific actions of another culture.

This claim still seems indisputably correct.

As is my wont, I took the one claim further and laid out a thumbnail defense of moral relativism. I was perhaps mistaken to do so, now that I reflect on matters. For one thing, I am not a philosopher and before these posts I have neither fully explored nor concretely adopted any particular philosophical stand related to morality. My mistake, then, has been to lock myself into a position of moral relativism before I have thoroughly investigated the scholarship in and around it.

Nevertheless, certain elements of relativism and objectivism seem irrefutable:

1. Cultural factors do play a role in what people consider moral and immoral behavior. Surely, we can agree on this?
2. An objectivist position that asserts universal rightness or wrongness of specific behavior/category X is indefensible. How can any human phenomenon, such as morality, be universal?

Beyond these elements, the important parts of the discussion concern not only when one is permitted to pass moral judgment on an act, as I've mentioned, but also when one is permitted to impose one's own morality on others by acting punitively or otherwise by prohibiting specific behavior.

I've also made a severe charge against some of the objectivists I have encountered:

Here's what I think actually is going on with these folks: What they are really after is sufficient justification for imposing one-world under Christianity. They're looking for the reason, not to use it necessarily but for the security of having it. They are like a nation that trusts only itself with nuclear weapons and doesn't get why that would make everyone else nervous.

Honestly, these statements frighten me a bit because they are serious. Yet, I am not sure they are incorrect. That's why I have not revised or stricken them. Perhaps someone can show me a reason to think I am wrong on these charges, but Christianity's self-appointed mission to evangelize strikes me as a reason to think I'm correct.  

So what now? I will read up over the next week or two and aim to come back with a better articulated version of my position--whatever it may be--and why I think it is the most reasonable.

A week or two is virtually no time, and the matters under discussion can legitimately take a lifetime to argue and to study. I know that, and I mean no disrespect to the subject or the people who study it. My modest aim is to put together something coherent and more considered; my aim, in other words, is to improve.

I need 2012 to be about my dissertation, more than anything else. Many topics, and indeed blogging itself, will probably be placed on the back burner next year.

Season of the Kvetch

New posts here have been sparse lately because life has been hectic!

• My dissertation prospectus went in last week. My director was pretty happy with it, so I have high hopes that it will get signed off. This will leave only the writing to be done for my doctoral degree.
• Work has been a roller coaster. I've had plenty of tasks on my plate. Our company also recently had layoffs, which has most everyone here angry and nervous. Unfortunately, the situation in my company is not unlike that of many US defense contractors. We're all shrinking, as must happen when war draws down.
• Teaching has kept me pretty busy also. I've taught pretty much the same course for 10 years (16 if you count my earlier experiences as a TA), yet I still have to work at it.
• I saw The Bad Plus on Friday night. The show was truly excellent. The trio sounded great and they were right in front of me! My brothers enjoyed the performance, but my father did not, as expected. Dad likes standards. I'm glad he came, though, and I think he was glad too.

Don't Be A Seeker

At one time in my early twenties, I fancied myself a spiritual seeker. I pored through books on eastern and western religion, philosophy, wisdom, and success. Outside of general education and idle thoughts on the world and myself, none of these works did me any lasting good or made me any happier.

In fact, only two things have made me feel happy, satisfied, and energized. The first thing is to remember reality. This life is it. This is what we get. It's actually quite an amazing life, and reality is almost unfathomably wonderful.

The second thing is to work.To me, work covers everything from reading to running, and from professional tasks to in-home fix-ups. When I work, I tend to be more active and more social, and it exhilarates me.

Spiritual seeking is not reality based, and it's not work. To seek is to denigrate reality because the seeker wants more or wants something else than reality. Seeking is work, but it's object is to cease working. The seeker looks to acquire something that will render seeking unnecessary. The seeker wants to arrive to a place where s/he can receive: receive enlightenment, receive peace, receive happiness, and so on.

People are enamored of seekers. They fashion seekers as romantic heroes, but this veneration is an old lie. A foolish, harmful lie.

Don't be a seeker. Be here and now. And let's work.

What a Rosh!

What am I doing for Rosh Hashanah? Eating a meal with my family (yay) and avoiding shul (yay yay).

But I wish all a happy day and the sweetest of life always.

Wednesday Comedy: Is It Safe?

Just endured two days of dental work. Today's fun was some periodontal surgery. By "fun" I mean "agony."

On the Road and on the iPod

Rain and lightning can't stop me!

I braved downpours, flashes of light, and deep rumbles from the sky for today's 5:30-in-the-morning run--but I have more than just will power on my side. Over the past few weeks, I've ramped up on the runs because I'm training for the July 4 Harvard Pilgrim 10K road race. I like this race especially because it finishes on the field at Gillette Stadium, where my beloved New England Patriots football team play.

And there's more: I have also started strength training three times a week. I plan to look good and run well on July 4 and beyond. At the very least, I want to do the entire 6.2-mile course without having to walk any part of it. Last year, I was not ready for the full distance and had to walk a good chunk of the race.

I'm moving and grooving now, though. Here's what my weeks tend to look like these days, exercise-wise:

Day	Exercise	Duration
Sunday	Long run	60-90 mins
Monday	Strength training	15-30 mins
Tuesday	Run	30-40 mins
Wednesday	Strength training	15-30 mins
Thursday	Run	20-30 mins
Friday	Strength training	15-30 mins
Saturday	Open	Open

Although I have plenty of desire to get faster and stronger, one motivation for me is the running playlist on my (wife's) iPod. Here's what I listen to, in no particular order and without the usual quotation marks around song titles:

• The Bad Plus
• Lost of Love
• Prehensile Dream
• Flim

• Esbjorn Svensson Trio
• Dolores in a Shoestand
• Did They Ever Tell Cousteau?

• Led Zeppelin
• The Song Remains the Same (Live)
• Deep Purple
• Highway Star (Live)
• Living Colour
• Behind the Sun
• Cake
• The Distance
• Eminem
• Lose Yourself
• Foo Fighters
• Everlong
• Metallica
• Fade to Black
• Twisted Sister
• I Wanna Rock
• U2
• Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses
• Miles Davis
• What I Say
• Motorhead
• Ace of Spades
• Andrew Bird
• Sweetmatter
• Armchair

I have other artists and songs on the playlist, but these make up the highlights. I'm really into The Bad Plus recently.

Who Knows What's Next?

Images of Sendai, Japan, from before (left) and after the quake and tsunami.   AFP Photo/ GeoEye

The ongoing crisis in Japan is hardly fathomable. No words. I must, I must, turn to music.

And this.

I send love, good thoughts, as much money as I can, and perhaps a greater sense of urgency to help save our planet.

My Shalom Bayis: A Birthday Wish

In Judaism, Shalom Bayis signifies an ideal in family life encompassing the spousal relationship and general tranquility in the home. In practical terms, the ideal is realized both through kind words and avoidance of harsh speech: more of the first, less of the second.

What I want most of all for my birthday--I am 41 years old today--is Shalom Bayis. This is my pet ideal for 2011. I want to to make more shalom, "peace," in my home and in my sphere of influence, my neighborhood, my work, my blogosphere, and so on. My birthday wish, therefore, is to practice and teach the peaceful arts better than I have before.

Unfortunately, Shalom Bayis also endorses a patriarchal ideal in traditional Judaism. The husband is always and only head of the home. The wife, although essential and esteemed, is always secondary. Husband and wife are partners and obligated to each other, but their roles and public positioning are distinct and never coequal.

For this reason, I hereby co-opt Shalom Bayis for my own sensibilities and will implement it in my own way. Neither Judaism nor Yiddishkeit stands above me (or below me) as an authority on Shalom Bayis. I say thank you very much for the concept, and I will now employ it as I see fit.

And, yes, this is a peaceful stance. I am genuinely grateful for the concept of Shalom Bayis. It focuses my mind on what a peaceful home might really be, on what makes peace, and on what I consider home. But Shalom Bayis is my responsibility and my work. It doesn't belong to Judaism or to Jews. It belongs to me, and so I have lots of work to do and little time to worry about how others define their world.

Fortunately, I already have much peace in my life and in my home especially. My lesson of the past year, however, is the realization that I can create peace. I can make more than I have done before.

• I can use the language of action to show my love and gratitude for my family.
• I can use my words wisely by speaking when I should and remaining silent when speech is unnecessary.
• I can work harder and longer.
• I can eat less and I can eat healthier.
• I can exercise more frequently.
• I can walk mindfully and purposefully.
• I can cook meals for the family.
• I can visit friends and family.
• I can laugh more and remember happiness.
• I can become slower to anger.
• I can reduce spending.
• I can read and write more, and with greater diversity.
• I can share new experiences.

Peace is one more lesson in a life that certainly does get better and better.

Permissive Versus Demanding Parenting

Amy Tan, whose story "Two Kinds" fictionalizes Chinese parenting and children who experience it.

Amy Chua, a professor at Yale Law School, writes in the Wall Street Journal that high demands and an emphasis on academic achievement produce happy and successful children in the long run. Chinese parenting, she says, exemplifies this demanding model, which is contrasted with the more nurturing and permissive Western style of parenting:

What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is fun until you're good at it. To get good at anything you have to work, and children on their own never want to work, which is why it is crucial to override their preferences. This often requires fortitude on the part of the parents because the child will resist; things are always hardest at the beginning, which is where Western parents tend to give up. But if done properly, the Chinese strategy produces a virtuous circle. Tenacious practice, practice, practice is crucial for excellence; rote repetition is underrated in America. Once a child starts to excel at something—whether it's math, piano, pitching or ballet—he or she gets praise, admiration and satisfaction. This builds confidence and makes the once not-fun activity fun. This in turn makes it easier for the parent to get the child to work even more.

At the level of parent-child interaction, the contrast in Chinese and Western parenting styles is remarkable:

The fact is that Chinese parents can do things that would seem unimaginable—even legally actionable—to Westerners. Chinese mothers can say to their daughters, "Hey fatty—lose some weight." By contrast, Western parents have to tiptoe around the issue, talking in terms of "health" and never ever mentioning the f-word, and their kids still end up in therapy for eating disorders and negative self-image. (I also once heard a Western father toast his adult daughter by calling her "beautiful and incredibly competent." She later told me that made her feel like garbage.) Chinese parents can order their kids to get straight As. Western parents can only ask their kids to try their best. Chinese parents can say, "You're lazy. All your classmates are getting ahead of you." By contrast, Western parents have to struggle with their own conflicted feelings about achievement, and try to persuade themselves that they're not disappointed about how their kids turned out.

Chua advises Western style parents to assume their children are strong and behave accordingly, rather than worrying about the self-esteem of the kids:

Western parents worry a lot about their children's self-esteem. But as a parent, one of the worst things you can do for your child's self-esteem is to let them give up. On the flip side, there's nothing better for building confidence than learning you can do something you thought you couldn't.

She also says that "Chinese parents believe that their kids owe them everything. The reason for this is a little unclear, but it's probably a combination of Confucian filial piety and the fact that the parents have sacrificed and done so much for their children." Finally, she observes that

Chinese parents believe that they know what is best for their children and therefore override all of their children's own desires and preferences. That's why Chinese daughters can't have boyfriends in high school and why Chinese kids can't go to sleepaway camp. It's also why no Chinese kid would ever dare say to their mother, "I got a part in the school play! I'm Villager Number Six. I'll have to stay after school for rehearsal every day from 3:00 to 7:00, and I'll also need a ride on weekends." God help any Chinese kid who tried that one.

Chua sums up the difference as one of values:

Western parents try to respect their children's individuality, encouraging them to pursue their true passions, supporting their choices, and providing positive reinforcement and a nurturing environment. By contrast, the Chinese believe that the best way to protect their children is by preparing them for the future, letting them see what they're capable of, and arming them with skills, work habits and inner confidence that no one can ever take away.

Chua does not hide that she feels Western parenting is kinder but ultimately allows children to fail as adults. Western parenting leaves children vulnerable and bereft in a brutal world.

Of course, not everyone agrees that Chinese style parenting is as successful and superior as Chua claims. At The Last Psychiatrist, the writer criticizes Chua confusing awesome for crazy:

You/she'll say that the Chinese discipline is what makes the kids successful, but that's silly.  Given that her husband is a Jewish American equivalent to her Chinese Americanness, why isn't their daughters' successes the result of Jewish fathering? Chua would say that she's the one who made her practice, but she's at work all day just like he is, right? I get that she yells more, ok, mission accomplished, but as a technical matter she's not there all the time, the kids have to be self-motivated, and that self-motivation came not just from the mother, but from growing up in with those parents. Unless she's arguing that the father is pretty much irrelevant? Oh, that is what she's arguing. Sigh.

What Chua believes has made her kids succeed isn't just that she makes them work hard, but that she is allowed to yell at them.

And the money quote:

That's why it's in the WSJ. The Journal has no place for, "How a Fender Strat Changed My Life." It wants piano and violin, it wants Chua's college-resume worldview. Sometimes it has no choice but to confront a Mark Zuckerberg but they quickly reframe the story into the corporate narrative. "The Google boys were on to something, but to make it profitable they had to bring in Eric Schmidt..." The WSJ is operating well within the establishment, right wing, artists-are-gay and corporations-are-not context. It wants kids who will conform, who will plug into the machine (albeit at the higher levels), it wants the kind of kids who want the approval of the kinds of people who read the WSJ.

Amy Chua thinks she wrote an essay and published it. Wrong. The WSJ wanted this kind of an article and they chose one from the thousands available.  They chose hers-- a woman's-- because if this same article had been written by a man it would have been immediately revealed as an angry, abusive, patriarchal example of capitalism.

Which is where this comes full circle. Amy Chua thinks she's raising her kids the Chinese way, but she is really raising them to be what the WSJ considers China to be: a pool of highly skilled labor that someone else will profit from. On second thought, that is the Chinese way.

I'm mixed on the Chua article. In the abstract, her philosophy makes a lot of sense and I wonder if my parenting shouldn't take a more Chinese approach. On the other hand, the specific parenting and spousal behavior she describes is rather abhorrent to me. I'd be pretty pissed if my wife mimicked me sarcastically.

Ultimately, the article and the strong reactions to it touch upon many issues of modern parenting. But with parenting, as with most everything, there's no help but self-help.

Civil Discourse, Sidelights, and Theistic Argumentation

Can we please get back to what we were talking about before?

The little kerfuffle documented in the post and comments of "The Creationist Is/Ought" deserves reflection. I won't shy away from the charge of being a bit of a troublemaker, but I also think that GEM is being a baby.

My observations on the key events:

(1) Perhaps I jumped the gun at calling "censorship" at Uncommon Descent. Who knows, if I had not reached out to GEM and/or mentioned that my post had been in moderation for between 36-48 hours to that point, then maybe my post would have been released anyway. Maybe not. Speculation is a waste on this.

(2) Did I "slander" GEM with the comment about Torquemada? No, I don't believe so. Here's what I said:

The Creationist Is/Ought is an argumentative bait-and-switch. You think you're getting a straightforward argument but what you're getting is evangelism. The evangelism can be of the soft-shoe variety, as with Dembski, or it can be more of the Torquemada sort, as with a character called "GEM of The Kairos Initiative," who describes himself as "A Caribbean-based applied scientist, educator and strategic change/ transformation advocate and facilitator."

Now, I admit that it's an asshole-ish comment, and deliberately so. The comment says that GEM has the argumentative and persuasive style of a grand inquisitor. It's no compliment, and it's more than snarky. But I also think the comment bears truth. GEM displays both dogmatism and fanaticism. His flailing rhetorical attacks can be off-putting. I won't psychoanalyze GEM, but I suspect his Torquemada tantrum is partially the result of his seeing that there's something to the comparison.

(3) I also exacerbated things by teasing GEM in a later comment:

But be honest, have you ever wanted to burn someone at the stake?

I suppose if I had placed a smiley emoticon at the end, the comment might have been taken in a more jocular spirit.

(4) Is the Torquemada reference offensive? Well, GEM certainly wasn't amused and wanted both an apology and a retraction.

You will observe that the slanderous association with Torquemada and the later vulgar reference are still there, as is an accusatory comment about whether I have wanted to burn people at the stake.

Now, I think you will also see that at no point des LT respond seriously to my pointing out thsat torquemada’s behaviour was not even reasonably typical of Spanish Catholics att he time, including how two leading sints in Spain at the time, objected seriously, and how Las Casas actually projected God’s destructive judgement on Spain for her crimes in the New World. And, discussion of comparative difficulties worldview issues is not at all even remotely associated with thumbscrews, racks, and bundles of dry branches.

LT has yet to seriously account for such an invidious comparison, but instead has tried to make light of it.

(5) As an apology, I offered the following to GEM:

You say I “owe” you an apology for the association with Torquemada. Let me first clarify that I did not call you “Torquemada” nor did I associate you personally with him. What I did was liken your style of argumentation and persuasion to that of an infamous Inquisitor.

To be sure, this was a deliberately over-the-top comparison designed to dramatize my perception of your approach. It was supposed to be humorous but also to seem close enough to truth to get you to tone it down a bit.

Now, upon reflection, I apologize for making a hurtful statement and will try to restrain myself better in the future.

But GEM found this unsatisfactory. Apparently, he won't be happy unless I perform a rhetorical auto-de-fé.

(6) Do I retract the comment? Sure, why not? I hereby retract any statements I have made here or at Uncommon Descent which directly or indirectly associate the Internet character known as "GEM of TKI (or Gordon)" and the historical individual Tomás de Torquemada.

(7) Will I remove anything I've posted? No. I don't see the need. If people think I'm a dick, so be it.

(8) On vanishing comments here at this blog: I gotta admit that I don't know where this is coming from. When people submit comments, I get an email notification. I know from experience that if a comment is too long Blogger will give a message on it, but I have had long comments still get posted. As far as I know, the only way for comments that have been posted to "vanish" is for either me or the original poster to delete the comment manually. I have not deleted any comments. I don't screen comments. I do, however, have moderation turned on for OPs that are older than 10 days.

(9) All this Torquemada business was an uninteresting sidelight to what I actually wanted to have GEM discuss, namely his specific reasoning behind the thesis --

We live as contingent creatures amidst a world of other contingent creatures, in an observed cosmos that is evidently finely balanced at an operating point that allows for C-chemistry cell based, intelligent life.

Such a contingent cosmos implies a necessary being as its ultimate ground. That necessary being would be the ultimate reality. (emphasis added)

(10) Eventually, however, GEM gives the following as the chain of reasoning for his God conclusion:

a – The genetic code (yes, CODE, as in, LANGUAGE) based DNA [right arrow] mRNA [right arrow] Ribosome + tRNAs [right arrow] protein chaining process is precisely a case of discrete-state, code-based information system processing, i.e. instantiation not metaphor or analogy. (This, at length, LT had to concede.)

Let me point out that code and language are not necessarily equivalent, at least linguistically. To a linguist, and this is partially my training, codes typically represent languages and have no syntax or structure of their own.

True language, on the other hand, meets all of the following conditions: (i) it is a mode of communication; (ii) it has semanticity, in that its signals have meaning; (iii) it has a pragmatic function; (iv) it has interchangeability, which is the ability of participants to both send and receive messages; (v) it has cultural transmission, in that users can learn the language system from other users; (vi) it has arbitrariness, in that the form of the signals is not logically related to their meaning; (vii) it has discreteness, which is the property of having complex messages built up out of smaller parts; (viii) it has displacement, which is the ability of users to communicate about things not present in space or time; and (ix) it has productivity, which is the ability of users to produce and understand any number of messages, including messages never expressed before and expressing novel ideas.

GEM's use of code and language requires serious justification. Are these terms denotatively appropriate or are they human convention for nicely approximating a conception of how genetic processes function?

But if we are using the language of communication, then we need to ask what specifically acts as sender, what as message, what as receiver. GEM is trying to set up the idea that because we have a coded or linguistic process, then we must have a sentient being to conceive of the (coded or linguistic) message and input it into the sending source. But I tend to think the receiving source is more important in functional communication. Thus, we people can look at the top of a mountain and believe it resembles a human face (e.g., the Old Man of the Mountain), yet we need not consider it a non-human communication with representational status.

Now, however, we can address what many of us know: that there is such a thing as genetic code that performs real functions within living organisms. Yet the presence and function of a code is only part of the story. There is a historical dimension, and there is a biological dimension related to the receiving "decoder" that is related to that history. When we consider the parts, history, and functionality of genetic code processing in living organisms, I think that what we can trace back in time remains squarely in the natural. We don't need to imagine a "programmer" at some point in the dawn of life; we need to imagine a simple interaction where a second organelle emerges as a replication of the first, then replication with a difference, then structured replication, and phased replication. Of course, I'm neither a biologist nor a geneticist, but my point is that I find it much harder to imagine a scenario where God just poofs one or more life forms into existence. The God scenario short-circuits history and biology, and just leaves us to marvel at the code.

GEM continues:

b – Moreover, this digital information system is a key part of a self-replicating entity that also interacts with and acts on its environment, i.e the cell indeed instantiates the generic von Neumann type self-replicator.

c – Given the implied complexity and the fact that even so small a set of digital, coded, functionally specific information as 1,000 bits sits in a configuration space of 2^1,000 ~ 10^301, the whole observed cosmos of ~10^80 atoms across its lifespan and changing state every Planck time could not credibly undergo enough states to sample 1 in 10^150 of that space. That is, a random walk search of that config space rounds down to no search.

GEM's argument in Item C seems to amount to COMPLEXITY, therefore NO EVOLUTION. It appears to be an argument from personal incredulity based on the idea of teleology. That is, the result of the process is really unlikely and the chances of getting to that specific result are almost infinitesimal. Yet, this is post hoc thinking, if I've represented GEM correctly. And if so, notice how we are skipping over history, functionality, and the very real environmental ecology within which any cell must fight to exist. Item C also seems to switch venues from the biological (Items A and B) to the cosmos at a quantum level.

However, I must admit that I am not quite certain about what GEM is saying in Item C. The numbers and terms like "configuration space" are out of my daily ken. Moving on:

d – So, chance, the other source of highly contingent outcomes [natural selection filters simply cut off lower or non-functioning sub populations so, it does not create configurations] is not a credible explanation for such an information system. Intelligence routinely produces objects and systems that exceed this threshold, e.g. this post.

The suggestion in this item is that if chance (coded here as natural selection) is not a credible explanation, then creationism wins by default. Of course, natural selection is not at all the whole of evolutionary processes, and I give an overview of evolution here. GEM then says:

e – Credibly, life is designed. [And by an intelligence, and in a cosmos that sits at a finely and complexly balanced operating point that facilitates such C-chemistry cell based life, i.e the cosmos is also credibly designed. Something very much like God is credible.]

Whoa, GEM has leaped far into "ought" territory here in Item E. What does "designed" mean; that is, what are the defining and the attendant properties of design? Can things be ordered and patterned without being designed? How did we get from the idea of very complex in Item C to the idea of "designed" here? GEM needs to show his math now: what else besides apparent complexity indicates (not implies) design? We are in no position at this point to deal with other terms such as "intelligence" and "God."

f – Of course, I raised the issue of an implication above. It turns out that LT up to the point where I corrected him, seems to have conflated the act of inferring — which is subjective — with the fact of implication. But, once we have some claim P, that cannot be true and another claim Q is false, then P = > Q, i.e. IF P is so, THEN Q must also be so. (For instance, if I am typing this post then I must be alive, intelligent, purposeful and able to speak and write English.)

GEM misses my point, I think. Implications rely on assumptions about P and Q, and these assumptions need to be examined along with the premise of implication. GEM's example, for instance, doesn't imagine that GEM actually may not know not a lick of English at all and is instead typing from an English exemplar. If GEM is merely copying a sheet of paper from another source, then a critical element of the implication is flawed. Similarly, GEM's claim that a contingent universe implies an intelligent creator cannot simply be accepted at face value. I'm not accepting the implication just yet because I'd like to "peek under the covers," as it were. And when we peek, we find some serious gaps and flaws, as I have already demonstrated above.

We go forward with GEM:

g – Of course, there is an “I” — a subject — who makes the inference just above; but, once it is well warranted, it is a fact that stands on its own merits. It is objectively true.

I'm not sure what these assertions of the "I" and objective truth are supposed to mean or do. It seems as though GEM is trying to suggest that his implication of a creator (or a credible creator) is objectively true. But the implication is unsupported and the assumption of objectivity is nonsensical at this point. In other words, GEM's inference is not "well warranted." He's trying to sneak in his inference as an objective truth, but it just doesn't work and he needs to accept this.

h – And, chains of thousands or millions of such implications are routinely used in math, science and technology, as well as management and daily life, so we just as routinely hang a lot more than our hats on implications and well-warranted inferences to such implications.

This unsupported assertion glosses over the fact that sitting around dreaming whether life is designed has little resemblance to the practical application of reasoning and implication. This item provides no support for the main argument.

i – To object to an implication because it is an implication or because a subject infers it — because one does not like where it points, is thus selective hyperskepticism: making a question-begging and inconsistent objection that would not be made in a materially similar case of comparable warrant where one agrees with the conclusion.

Sigh: Actually, I question the implication more than object to it. You, GEM, have the burden to show the implication is both valid and sound. So far your points have failed to meet this burden; this, unfortunately for you, is a fact.

j – Of course, the context of the objection was the inference from a contingent cosmos to a cause of that cosmos, and onward to the existence of a non-contingent, necessary being as the ultimate ground for the observed credibly contingent cosmos.

k – This brings to bear a now common objection to reasoning on cause and contingency. To that the classic, simple example of a fire is a sufficient counter:

1: A fire has a beginning, it needs to be sustained in existence [it needs fuel heat and oxidiser in an exothermic chain reaction], and it may go out.

2: A fire is contingent, i.e its beginning and existence depend on things beyond it. (There are circumstances on which it can and will exist, and there are circumstances where it cannot exist.)

3: That is it is caused, has sufficient factors that allow it to spring into existence, and has necessary factors that if absent will block its beginning or cut off its existence.

4: Such factors are termed: CAUSES.

5: A sufficient cluster of causal factors will trigger and sustain a fire, and absence or removal of a necessary factor will prevent its beginning or make it go out.

6: Just so, our observed cosmos credibly had a beginning, and has been sustained in existence to today. It is contingent, was caused, and is caused.

7: But, an actualised infinite regress of causes (as was pointed out above, cf 44) is absurd, so the chain of causes that led to our cosmos terminates.

8: Once we have a contingent cosmos, we have a root cause that is self-sufficient, i.e it is not contingent, does not depend on other causes, and cannot go out of existence due to want of a necessary causal factor.

9: We have just described what philosophers call, a necessary being.

10: The real issue is which candidate for this is the best, e.g. a wider deeper material cosmos out of which sub-cosmi bubble up from time to time at random, or an intelligent, purposeful designer.

The reasoning here is flawed when GEM tries to get from a fire on Earth to the very beginning of space-time in our universe. I think the points I make to tgpeeler are relevant as a response here to GEM's 10-point scenario:

Let me ask, though, whether you find terms such as “past,” “cause,” and “first” problematic in the context of the origins of the universe. Are these terms, as we are using them here, appropriate and applicable to the origins of the universe?

When it comes to our universe, we have a scientific case for claiming that we can explain it without having to go outside of it. For a very high-level, 101, explanation of what I’m saying see Sean Carroll’s video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCVqJw7T1WU.

One of the arguments I’ve made to Kairos is that when going “outside” our universe, we are hard-pressed to extrapolate from the present (e.g., as you say, “things are changing in the present”) to a past as far back as the very origins of our universe.

So, I think most everything that you or I could possibly say about a “first cause” would not only be uncertain, but I might wager it would be wrong (including this statement I just made). But now I’m speculating wildly, too.

I said before that we have a scientific case for the universe creating itself from nothing (I think this is close enough to the famous statement from Hawking’s recent book). I’m not saying it’s a great or even a good case; I’m only asserting that there is a case. This much I think is indisputable.

So, I have your case and I have Hawking’s case. I think the question at this point is how should reasonable people evaluate the two cases against each other (and other cases, as may be appropriate). Taking a neutral stance toward both cases, we need to know what criteria to apply in determining the quality of cases and the comparative evaluation.

My intuition is that this is as far as any of us can go.

GEM's banking on the infinite regress problem as a way to smuggle in the need for a designer (i.e., God). Most everything GEM talks about, from DNA codes to chains of implications, address what appears to be his need to posit a first cause.

GEM continues:

l – But already, we have reason to believe our cosmos is designed, so a designer is plainly the more credible cause; unpalatable though that may be to LT and ilk.

Unfortunately, we don't really have such reason to believe our cosmos is designed. GEM has given no definition of design and he has not really addressed competing theories in any detail, so how could they possibly be undercut?

m - Similarly, once we see that we are morally governed creatures, it is credible that we are under moral law and a Lawgiver

Assuming that we see and understand what "morally governed" means. Paley would be proud to see the watchmaker analogy coming in here. It's also credible, I think more credible, that as a matter of human convention we understand ourselves as morally governed creatures. GEM finishes with the expected claim:

n - The best overall candidate is a Creator-God who as to his character is good.

I disagree, and I don't think GEM or anyone else has shown it.

Ultimately, this whole mess amounts to this, an argument made by GEM:

The aggregate complexity and specific, functional organisation of that system scream design to all but those who are deafened by a priori commitments to denying what would overturn their comfortable, amoral materialism.

Design, he says, is obvious...except to people like me who are prejudiced against the idea. Surely, I have no good reason to doubt or question his conclusion of design. Certainly, I must maintain my skepticism because otherwise I would have to submit to God as my moral authority and thereby become a Christian practitioner.

This is, of course, hogwash. Whatever the case for design, it is speculative and only partially helpful. Mainly, design is an answer to a question we are not asking. GEM's argument has no persuasive force toward design. The argument is undoubtedly sensible, and that may be enough for some to set themselves in the design camp, but it's not really backed very well by data. GEM's best argument is the analogy with the fire in Item K. Finally, I bristle at GEM's use of the Argument from Psychology.

Look, I have no problem with living as commanded in the Torah if it's all true. I have no problem in principle with being a prayer guy, or a kippah guy, or a mitzvah guy. I don't even have a problem with accepting Jesus as my personal savior. Just make me forget everything I know about reasoning, history, language, and the way the universe works.

No One Cares

The universe doesn't care either. Buck up, already.

My mother was in the hospital almost a year ago. To my great disappointment, she received what I felt was unsatisfactory quality of care from what I thought was one of the best health care facilities in the U.S., if not the world. During her hospital stay (and then a stint at a rehabilitation center), my mother was in intense pain, and no one on the hospital staff seemed as dedicated to diagnosing the problem and solving it as I would have liked.

I don't usually watch TV shows like House or Grey's Anatomy, but perhaps I had harbored false preconceptions of doctors as tortured detectives who relentlessly pursue the truth about what's ailing patients and themselves. The reality of doctors, nurses, and patients was uglier and definitely less glamorous than TV medical dramas. The real-life hospital staff was overworked and distracted. They tried to make my mother's discomfort manageable, certainly, but basically wanted her to follow directions and be a good patient while they labored to perform their duties around the ward. 

After a particularly bad visit one evening, I recalled the words from Matthew Arnold's very well-known "Dover Beach":

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

My mother's situation--from which, thankfully, she later recovered fully--illustrates on a small scale the very real circumstances we are discussing when we talk about things like the universe, purpose, and meaning.

In the real world, if we are not looking out for the ones we love then they are at the mercy of people  with other priorities and forces without priorities. For every rainbow here is a devastating volcano blast there. For every deed of sharing and selflessness is one of intense brutality. But for the light we make ourselves, we live in a place that will be dark or light only according to its laws and without any ability even to register indifference to us.

The thesis I want to argue now is that we are fortunate to live in such a universe. It is a good thing for us, in other words, that our universe is blind, pitiless, meaningless, and pointless.

Consider the following quotes:

The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.

-Richard Dawkins

The great accumulation of understanding as to how the physical world behaves only convinces one that this behavior has a kind of meaninglessness about it.

-Richard Feynman

The more the universe seems comprehensible the more it also seems pointless.

-Steven Weinberg

People often argue that if evolution is true or if scientists such as Weinberg are correct, then the universe is a depressing place and our lives are but jokes. Not so, I say, not so at all.

If evolution is true and Weinberg is correct, then the universe is neutral. It is not for us, but it's not against us either. The natural events of the world happen because of the conditions out of which they emerge, not because we are being praised or punished by an overlooking, intervening moral judge.

The utter neutrality of the universe is liberating. Because the universe, and everything in it, is neutral with respect to us, we are free to make and to find meaning from within ourselves.

With this freedom comes the freedom to revise, re-create, and re-invent meanings. We are empowered to challenge the values of our parents, our mainstream culture, and ourselves.

We can question values, we should do so, and we should absolutely insist on the care and preservation of this power for all people. This power to challenge and to question, in reasoned discourse and in equitable political circumstances, should be inalienable.

If the universe is an instrument of some being's will, then our individual desires are in decidedly worse standing than in the neutral universe. If the universe is part of someone else's plan and subject to someone else's whims and judgments, then we are insignificant even to ourselves.

How did my mother begin to recover? We hired a private nurse to sit with her and to advocate for her before the hospital staff. We visited every day and stayed with her, along with my father. The nurse often stayed overnight. The nurse mediated between us, my mother, and the hospital.

Once we realized that we, like my mother, were among confused alarms, we were able to take simple actions to make things better. Once we accepted that we were ignorantly fighting by night, we focused on solutions that would bring us all better visibility into what was happening.

In the universe of judgment and partiality, we were powerless and immobile. In the neutral universe, we were able to seize our part of the day.

Communication Breakdown

Can people with fundamental disagreements have productive debates? To some extent, it depends on what we mean by productive. To me, productive means, or should mean, that one debater acknowledges the other's position is supported by a superior argument. But perhaps my definition is too rigid and I should back off it. Besides, in my experience such acknowledgment rarely happens.

But, why is this outcome so infrequent? Perhaps I'm bad at arguing or perhaps it's a matter of holding pre-set positions? To attempt some preliminary and provisional answers, I'd like to follow an online debate that was initiated by "SJ," who had commented on a post of mine and later challenged me to debate him. The subject of the debate was the Cosmological Argument (CA). Our full debate is available at SJ's blog.

What I want to do here, however, is examine our various exchanges and see how we argue with each other. In the images below, I have reproduced only the beginnings of our comments. I have done this to keep the text in the images legible. I also don't think very much gets said after the first 3-5 sentences that really warrants full representation here.

Here, then, is how we begin:

My position is that CA doesn't solve the infinite regress problem. SJ appears to agree that infinite regress is a problem. However, his phrasing is curious: The point, he says, is that the CA solves the infinite regress problem. I agree with SJ on what the point of SA is. My challenge still stands, however, I don't the CA achieves its point. Now, in Exchange 2 I will make precisely this argument, but I don't want to skip over the new argument that SJ introduces, that the Bible gives us an idea of who/what cause the universe.

Thus, I think already that we are not getting anywhere. We're multiplying arguments instead of closing them down.That is, we're not being productive in the sense of moving either one of us from our original position. Instead, I see that even in my own argumentation, I'm giving a daisy chain of argumentative demands: (1) what causes God, (2) why can't the universe be uncaused, (3) how can you develop an explanation from something that is inscrutable. I suppose the thrust of these questions was to get SJ to see his position as basically unbalanced and narrow. I don't think my strategy worked because he deflected my parry by suggesting I wasn't appreciating the point of the CA and by using the Bible as an authority on knowledge from/about God.And of course

Let's look at the next exchange:

Here, I try to make the distinction (mentioned above) between the point of the CA and whether or not it successfully makes its point. I also reiterate my original argument. If I understand correctly, SJ asserts that God is by definition an uncaused cause. I imagine that this assertion is meant to defend my earlier point that invoking God just defers the regress problem: instead of wondering what caused the universe, now we must wonder what caused God.

The argument was originally a contest to move the opponent from a position concerning the efficacy of the CA. As Exchange 3 starts, SJ and I have focused on the existence of God and the state of knowledge in physics. I use focused ironically, since we're really at a rather vague and unspecified level with our comments. Follow along below with the exchanges. The discussion devolves into trite barbs and finally dissolves with mutual raspberries:

Are there any lessons or takeaways from all this? Yes. In retrospect I don't think I should have argued the success/failure or the merits/flaws of the CA. Both SJ and I already had solidified positions going into this debate. I dare say neither of us was entertaining the idea of moving off of these positions. We were not debating but rather articulating our positions; indeed, our function to each other was to help the other clarify and refine his position.

I have nothing against clarification and refinement, naturally. But I don't think I learned anything from this debate. I now believe that the better approach would have been to expand upon the CA itself. The CA is not just one argument, and there is more than just one formulation of it. This might have been a better discussion and a more productive debate, if indeed we ever got to debating.

I also think the goals of the debate and the "rules of engagement" might have been better spelled out by we the participants. What was it we wanted from each other?

So, I'll try to be better and more mindful in my debating.

I Am Atoned, Bitches!

In a previous episode, I wavered on what would be the most appropriate and happy actions for me to take on Yom Kippur.

Unfortunately, I decided against happiness and good sense:

• I attended some of my local Yom Kippur services. 
• I skipped Kol Nidre, but attended the morning and Musaf services the next day.
• I fasted from before 6:30 pm to about 4:30 pm the next day.
• Up until the time I actually went to services, I considered driving up to the Robert Frost Farm in Derry, NH. I would have really enjoyed that.
• Services were decent.
• I always like to sing.
• The rabbi's stories and jokes were generally good.
• He made, however, one bad evolution joke, the one about monkey's being on the husband's side of the family.
• He also brought in, completely seriously, an Omphalos argument.
• Stories of Jewish martyrs don't inspire me at all but rather point to the seriousness of religious and politically based intolerance.

• If I ever go to another service, it will be with family. I want to be with my wife and kids, my mother and father, my brothers and nieces/nephews.

10 Things Science Says Will Make You Happy

A 2008 article by by Jen Angel lists 10 Things Science Says Will Make You Happy. The ten are:

(1) Savor Everyday Moments
(2) Avoid Comparisons
(3) Devalue Money
(4) Have Meaningful Goals
(5) Take Initiative at Work
(6) Make Friends and Treasure Family
(7) Smile
(8) Say Thank You
(9) Exercise
(10) Give Away

No surprises here, really--at least with what appears. I say "at least with what appears" because I think there are some curious omissions. I suppose meditation can fit under the "Savor the Everyday" category, but I noticed it was missing. Prayer is kind of like meditation; it can also be a vehicle for expressing thankfulness. So, like meditation, it can fit above, but is not explicitly mentioned. A big omission is music, either listening or playing. I wouldn't have been surprised if there was mention that people were happier when they liked music, but again maybe this is because music can fall under another category, such as "Savor the Everyday."

Many of the behaviors listed are the explicit focus of reflection in weekly religious gatherings and sermons. Indeed, the very exercise of a Shabbat service or a Sunday worship covers several of the behaviors at one time. Many religious services focus directly on savoring the everyday, on emphasizing self-fulfillment and avoiding comparisons, on devaluing money and so on.

No wonder people become so attached to their synagogues and churches! No wonder people believe so strongly that their religion is good and that it works. These people must be puzzled at Atheism, as if it rejects these ten behaviors.

But the truth is that Atheists support all of those behaviors. We too need to perform them, and we need to be reminded to do them because we too sometimes forget. The truth is that the ten behaviors are universal: there is nothing specifically religious about them.This list above, as I read it, itemizes ways to live a morally significant life. I think that anyone who regularly performs the ten behaviors will have the experience of living meaningfully and purposefully.

And yet we can agree on these ten, can't we? We can agree on wanting to be happy and on seeing these as ten ways to do it.

Surely, this is a start.