Governing through Reason
The World in Politics
A scroll from the Dead Sea
There is so much interesting news this week, its hard to pick just one thing to write about. Hiring is up, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is up…but, paradoxically, so is unemployment. Since early 2010, the economy has added over five million private-sector jobs, which have been partially offset by a loss of over 660,000 public sector jobs, for a net gain of about 4.5 million. The Federal Reserve is keeping interest rates low, which is causing some conservative economists to continue fearing inflation (for which there is, so far, no evidence).
Mitt Romney returned from his whirlwind tour, which received mixed reviews. He returned in time for terrible reactions to his tax plan. The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center called it “mathematically impossible,” which is really not quite what we expected from a financial genius like Romney. Perhaps this is why he doesn’t want to release his tax returns: maybe he can’t add.
Speaking of confused signals, The Dark Knight Rises continues to do well at theaters, despite the tragedy in Colorado. Talk has died down about whether there was any intentional connection between Bane and Bain.
But for me, perhaps the most important of current events is about to happen late tonight. NASA’s latest Mars rover, named Curiosity, is scheduled to land on the Red Planet about 1:30 AM Monday morning, Eastern time. The landing will be carried almost live — “almost,” because there is a fourteen-minute delay for the signals for the craft to travel the millions of miles from Mars to Earth, giving plenty of time for censors to remove any profanity the craft might utter during the landing. (Curiosity has its own Twitter account, if you want to stay current.)
I’ve previously written about Curiosity and about the importance of science research in general and space exploration in particular. I don’t think I need to go over that ground again, but I will give an update once we know whether Curiosity landed successfully.
Instead, this is another piece in my Old Time Religion series. About fifteen years ago, I made an extensive study of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi texts and their importance for the development of both Judaism and Christianity. I suspect most Americans have heard of the Scrolls, though probably not of the Gnostic Gospels. I further suspect most know neither what these documents really are, nor why they matter. An introduction to these precious papers and a hint at what they mean seemed like a good topic.
There are two issues with publishing such an article, however. First, it’s an esoteric enough bit of history that, unless there is a clear link to some current events, it’s hard to draw you in to the topic on a political blog. Romney’s visit to Jerusalem might have furnished an excuse, but didn’t really give a compelling enough hook. The discovery of the lost Gospel of Judas would have been a powerful tie, but that happened six years ago, so it’s scarcely news. The closest current link happened when Reverend William Owens compared President Obama to Judas a few days ago.
The second issue is that I’ve changed computers multiple times since doing my Dead Sea Scrolls research, and all my files and notes and the dozen or two articles I wrote then are irretrievably lost. I still have the files, but they were archived using a unique and undocumented experimental compression and encryption algorithm that no longer exists. I’ll have to dig back into my research sources to construct an article for another time.
Trust me on this — or, better yet, don’t trust me; instead do some research on your own — the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Gnostic Gospels will tell you things you never knew about the West’s dominant religions and how they came to be. (I wonder…how hard do I need to work in order to interest political wonks in a subject of such importance to our history and to the current shape of our nation? Shouldn’t the origins of religions clearly be relevant to modern politics?)
In the meanwhile, consider the Dawn spacecraft, currently visiting the asteroid Vesta, slated to leave orbit for a flight to Ceres beginning late this month. It is the first interplanetary craft with an ion engine, and will be the first to travel to one world, enter orbit there, leave, travel to another, and orbit that one. It is also telling us things about the creation of Earth that we could not otherwise discover.
Or give some thought to New Horizons, heading for a 2015 rendezvous with Pluto, after which it will head out to objects still more distant from our Sun. This intrepid craft is the fastest-moving object humans have ever built. It will venture into the farthest reaches of our solar system, give us the first close-up look at Pluto, and tell us a lot about where comets come from.
In the midst of this political year, take a few moments to think about the origin of our world and our beliefs about it. The election campaign isn’t the only thing going on. The universe is happening all around us.
Related articles
- Visiting The New Dead Sea Scrolls Exhibition in Fort Worth (Spoiler Alert ~ It’s Amazing!) (frugalinfortworth.com)
- Obama, Romney Each Read Jobs Numbers Differently (wnyc.org)
- Barack Obama pays visit to Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit (timesofisrael.com)
- Banned from the Bible — Coast to Coast AM (panoffolin.wordpress.com)
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- Obama and Romney Tax Plans Are Pie-in-the-Sky — Bloomberg (bloomberg.com)
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#3 written by mclever 9 months ago
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@filistro
Beinart believes religion, not economics or policy differences, lies at the heart of all American politics.
That’s one of the themes I want to stress in my series here. Religion is more important to our politics than anyone likes to think.
Part of the idea of “rule by reason” (i.e., Logarchism) rests in understanding people with whom you disagree. If religion is an important part of that disagreement, then it makes sense to understand religion. Most people seem to view religion with a simplistic image, almost a caricature. This is true both of believers and non-believers. I’m trying to make a small change there.
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@mclever
My view of the Gnostics is complex. On the one hand, there is a strand of individualism and anti-authoritarianism inherent in Gnosticism. The whole idea that divine knowledge is obtained, not through the authority of a church, but by an individual, directly from God, seems more American than the idea of following rules or theologies established by someone else. On the other hand, their fierce commitment to divine revelation includes a possible insistence on non-rational shamanic mysticism incompatible with a secular state such as the U.S.
Their influence on Christianity is immense. Modern Christianity would be very different had the Gnostics won some of the early political battles. We’d have a different set of gospels in the New Testament. Centralized Christian authority might have been impossible, which means there would have been no Inquisition, no establishment of official state churches in Europe, no Crusades. Our modern world would be entirely different. That different world is one we almost lived in.
This is why I find a study of history to be so fascinating. We can’t really know why we are where we are without knowing where we’ve been and how we got there. Without understanding these things, we can’t hope to effectively or intelligently alter where we’re going.
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#6 written by mclever 9 months ago
@DC
Most people seem to view religion with a simplistic image, almost a
caricature. This is true both of believers and non-believers.That is a fascinating (and sadly true) observation, but one I likely wouldn’t have thought to make, because it’s the sort of thing that’s so obvious it gets overlooked.
I’ve noticed that if people think if they can label something, then they think that they understand it. We’re uncomfortable until we can put a label on someone, until we can put them in the right box. If I can call you an “evangelical Christian” or “Wiccan witch” then I know everything I need to know. Right? Because all Lutheran Christians, Reconstructionist Jews, Nichiren Buddhists, and atheists are exactly the same.
I think this phenomenon extends beyond religion, but because religion is an important part of our identity, the religious caricatures take out-sized perspective.
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#7 written by mclever 9 months ago
@DC
Perhaps that lack of ability to create a centralized “Christian” authority is why gnosticism lost those early battles. We’ve seen throughout history that a simple authoritarian structure often wins against a loose confederation with no cohesive leadership…
It’s been a while since I looked into the Gnostics myself, but what I remember was some very innovative and well-considered philosophical theology, but a definite lack of organized structure, as some of the ideas were internally contradictory with one another. I saw it more valuable as an intellectual challenge to expand the understanding of faith than as a guide to faith. It fit with my concept of a “mature” faith as opposed to an “immature” faith, however, in that it focused much more on internal spiritualism rather than obedience to rules.
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@mclever,
Excellent observation, and yes, it happens outside the area of religion, even outside the bounds of pigeon-holing people. A basic aspect of magical thought is that names have power, and knowing the name of a person or a thing gives you power over it. This mode of thinking extends even to people who insist they don’t believe in magic.
Observe: suppose you get sick. You don’t know what’s wrong, you just feel off — you have a fever, your skin is itchy, and you vomit every morning. You go to the doctor, he examines you, and pronounces that you have Adkin’s Syndrome. Right away, you become convinced the doctor has a handle on what’s wrong, and you’ve got a good chance of feeling better — even though “Adkin’s Syndrome” might simply be the name that’s been given to that set of symptoms, without anyone (even doctors) having the slightest idea what caused it or how to treat it. Just having a name for the set of symptoms makes us feel as if we know what’s wrong.
Words and names are powerful things. That’s why I enjoy being a writer.
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#9 written by Max 9 months ago
The biggest problem for Christians is that the VAST BULK of them NEVER actually read (I mean really read and see the context) the Bible. All those years of having the priesthood be the ones literate, and telling their flocks what THEY want the flock to know, is still prevalent, even in the Protestant denominations. It;s why we can have the Joel Osteen’s, Jimmy Swaggert’s, even the Jim Jones!
Which is why, on something as basic as the sacrament of marriage, does not have the definition most think it does and we can get silliness such as “traditional, Biblical marriage” jabber. Or even that Paul sanctioned pre-marital sex!
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@mclever
Perhaps that lack of ability to create a centralized “Christian”
authority is why gnosticism lost those early battles.Yes. I left that implication intentionally unmentioned in my comment, to see if anyone picked up on it. Often, a thing’s greatest strength is also its greatest weakness.
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#11 written by mclever 9 months ago
@DC
The example of getting sick is a good one, and much better than the one from physics that I intended to include in my original post (but deleted, because I couldn’t make it work quite right). Being able to put a name on something makes us feel like we have power over it.
Speaking of writing, I think you would find l.e. modesitt’s Imager series interesting, because of the hypothetical religion that he created for that series, where “Naming” is a sin and their god is the “Nameless.” As is common in his fiction, he indirectly touches on philosophical subjects, expounding in detail on the power of names through the various sermons that his characters hear (and deliver) on the subject.
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@Mac… the hypothetical religion that he created for that series, where “Naming” is a sin and their god is the “Nameless.”
On a somewhat similar vein, in one of her “Canopus in Argus” series (which by the way are pretty much the most intriguing books ever written) Doris Lessing posits a society where rhetoric is a crime, and harshly forbidden (punishable by stiff fines and jail sentences.)
Nobody in that society is allowed to “make speeches” or “give sermons” where (in the manner of both skilled politicians and televangelists) the cadence of the voice rises, the words come fast and loud, the tonal inflection is manipulative, facts are fudged and the audience begins to get swept along on a wave of emotion. Without rhetoric the public is required to weigh information on an intellectual rather than emotional basis.
Since reading those books many years ago, I often wonder what course both our religion and our politics would have taken if they could not have relied on rhetoric to sway hearts and minds.
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#13 written by mclever 9 months ago
“Canopus in Argus” sounds fascinating, filistro. I have difficulty imagining communication without the occasional rhetorical flourish. It’s so much a part of how we talk to one another, even about mundane things like a child taking his first steps or the latest adventure in bargain shopping or the dramatic walk-off win by the home team.
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I tried to read Canopus in Argus when it first came out. I couldn’t get into it, but I’ve matured some since then.
the hypothetical religion that he created for that series, where “Naming” is a sin and their god is the “Nameless.”
Oh, is that his name?
This is, in fact, what’s up with the biblical god. His name isn’t “God.” The Commandment about not taking the name of this god is vain is about not trying to do magic to invoke him, or to command him to do something (as people do in polytheist societies). The name of the biblical god is hidden. The four Hebrew letters used in the Torah as the name of this god (YHVH) are just the consonants, which are useless without the vowels. Supposedly, the highest priests of King David’s temple knew the proper pronunciation of this god’s name. No one knows if this oral tradition has been passed down to today (or at least, the people who do know aren’t telling).
(Neither “Jehovah” nor “Yaweh” is the correct pronunciation, by the way.)
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#17 written by shortchain 9 months ago
I could never get into Lessing’s fiction either. And I haven’t matured at all since I first tried.
By the way, Canopus is the brightest start in Argo’s sub-constellation Carina (“The keel”).
Argus was a mytical giant: (bonus Logarchism tie-in: “Argus was Hera’s servant. His great service to the Olympian pantheon was to slay the chthonic serpent–legged monster Echidna as she slept in her cave.)
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filistro,
In a condition called aprosody, patients lose the ability to use, and understand, prosody, the musical or rhetorical quality of language. Interestingly, they lose their emotional connection to music the same way. Music, and the prosody of language, have the ability to invoke emotional responses in the listener.
I think these patients would then fit Lessing’s description of what the world would be like without rhetoric.
As long as we’re talking science fiction that’s more lit-fic than science, I particularly like China Miéville’s The City and the City for its musings on the religious and cultural differences that divide us.
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The thing about Lessing’s fiction is that she lifts us out of the stifling constraint of a human life span and allows us to imagine a universe where people live lives immensely longer than ours, and what could be accomplished if that were so. When we are freed of the limits that are imposed by our very brief, mayfly-like existence here on Earth, so many more things are possible.
For instance, interstellar travel. We think such travel is “impossible” because the distances are so vast… but those distances are just huge as a function of time as it applies to our lives. It would take many human life spans for our space craft to reach another galaxy, even if we could build one. But what if there are people elsewhere who live a few million years instead of 75? For them, taking a jaunt to a distant nebula would just be the equivalent of a road trip to Vegas.
And a few million years is just a blip in time when you think of eternity, which is, like, a REALLY long time
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#21 written by shortchain 9 months ago
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@shortchain… They’d still never make it. I suspect they’d die of boredom.
What… in just a few days? They’d have to have shorter attention span than teenagers!
Assuming, of course, that a few thousand years to us earthlings would just be a few days to these folks. Doesn’t the Bible even talk about “heaven”, or our ultimate destination, as being a place where “a thousand years is as a single day?”
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#23 written by Valjiir 9 months ago
filistro -
I hate to jump in just to disagree — but eternity really has nothing to do with time, either really long or otherwise. Eternity is existence outside of time. It is a state that always IS with no past or present or future because there is no time by which to measure such concepts. At least, that’s the definition in the spiritual sense. *grin* And since a lot of this thread is talking about spiritual or religious things, it seemed important to mention.
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Val… always feel free to disagree with me! That’s how I learn stuff.
So… would you say that instead of eternity being, as I said, “a really long time”.. it would be more accurate to say that eternity is the medium in which time is contained… jsut as, for instance, space is the medium in which objects are contained, even though space itself is not “a really big object?”
(I hope so, because that’s a concept I am able to grasp…)
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@filistro,
it would be more accurate to say that eternity is the medium in which time is contained…
jsut as, for instance, space is the medium in which objects are
contained, even though space itself is not “a really big object?”That’s a cool metaphor to use (and Valjiir is right about eternity).
Think of eternity as being the absence of time … or think of time as being that which gets in the way of understanding eternity. Or eternity is what exists when time is removed.
Einstein thought of the universe as being not three dimensions (height, width, depth), but four (those three of space, plus one of time). We are forced to move through the time dimension at a certain rate (which, according to Einstein, can vary depending on how fast we move in the spacial dimensions), though we usually experience our movement through time as being a movement of one second every second.
But imagine you could be outside of Einsteinian space-time, and could look down on this four-dimensional reality, and see everything that was, everything that is, and everything that will be, all at once. You are no longer part of the flow of time, by definition (because you are looking at spacetime from outside of it). You are instead in the realm of Eternity, where all things exist all at once.
Now I’m going to go off on a tangent.
Quantum physics gave a slightly different rendition of this. An Einsteinian universe is predictable and unchanging. It is deterministic. That’s how you can see everything that “will be” in an Einsteinian eternity. In contrast, when you step out of time into the realm of eternity in a quantum universe, you see not only everything that is, and everything that was, but also everything that could be, and everything that could have been, along with all of the alternate versions of now that exist but that we can’t normally access.
A quantum universe is compatible with free will (because it is not deterministic), whereas an Einsteinian universe is not.
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@DC… In contrast, when you step out of time into the realm of eternity in a quantum universe, you see not only everything that is, and everything that was, but also everything that could be, and everything that could have been,
I’ve always thought that one of the coolest lines in the Bible occurs in John. Ch 8, where a group of disbelievers are hounding Jesus with questions, and he says something about what Abraham thought of him. One of the group says (in effect)… “C’mon, dude… you’re not even 50 years old but you claim you knew Abraham?”
And he replies simply, “Before Abraham was, I am.”
That always gives me chills. You could spend eternity trying to wrap your mind around that one sentence.
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Only a little over two hours until the scheduled landing of Curiosity on Mars.
Former director of NASA’s Ames Research Center, discussing the Mars rover mission, says: ‘There’s a lot of confidence there, but the truth is Mars is still mostly an unknown. It’s a tense confidence.’
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#31 written by DrFunguy 9 months ago
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#36 written by Armchair Warlord 9 months ago
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Good thing it was a success, otherwise it’s Obama’s fault! You would think all those blue shirted geeks w/security tags around their necks just won a gold medal. Was 15 when Armstrong walked on the moon = exciting. Landing R2D2 on Mars now, not so much.
ok, ok, I’ve become jaded lol. Let me know when they find females on Venus!
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#38 written by Armchair Warlord 9 months ago
It’s worth noting that Curiosity is a huge rover — about the size of a Mini Cooper, and it’s set up to find evidence of life on Mars. I hope if it does indeed do so it will galvanize our long-moribund efforts to launch a manned mission to that planet, sometime sooner than the “twenty years from now” it has been since 1969.
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hmm, probing Uranus? Maybe that’s the real reason Jenna Jameson is supporting mittens.
Was always a tad more fascinated that the 1st moon landing was live on tv in 1969, than the actual landing.
Venus and Mars are alright tonight …
>
btw, what’s the difference between eternity and infinity?
Religion and Math?Will you love me forever!!!!
I couldn’t take it any longer
God I was crazed
And when the feeling came upon me
Like a tidal wave
I started swearing to my god and on my mother’s grave
That I would love you to the end of time
I swore that I would love you to the end of time!
So now I’m praying for the end of time
To hurry up and arrive
’Cause if I gotta spend another minute with you
I don’t think that I can really survive
I’ll never break my promise or forget my vow
But God only knows what I can do right now
I’m praying for the end of time
It’s all that I can do
Praying for the end of time,
So I can end my time with you!! -
The descent phase of this mission was perhaps the most ambitious thing NASA has ever attempted, and it appears to have gone off flawlessly. The first two pictures from Curiosity were alone the price of admission.
Now, we get a few years of incredible science, and maybe we discover life on another world.
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Putting the new Mars rover in perspective is one of America’s best sources for fake news, Andy Borowitz:
Mars Rover Should Not Get So Much Attention, Say Higgs Boson Scientists
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#45 written by shortchain 9 months ago
filistro,
I’m pretty good at willingly suspending my disbelief, but a theorized alien race with a perception of time so slow that thousands of years to us seems like a few days to them is a problem.The theory of evolution would indicate that faster individuals will survive more readily. All things being equal, the slower creature gets eaten by the bear (or alien analog). So what evolutionary pressure would make a slower time perception a benefit?
I suggest that the only environment in which a species with such a slow perception of the passage of time could evolve is one where the rate of change is equally slow. That suggests, in turn, that the species would have to evolve somewhere outside the solar system (even Pluto has a year “only” 250 times that of Earth).
This would mean that their tolerance for acceleration would be minimal (independently from that, consider what a species with such a perception of time would perceive in an acceleration of, say, 1 gravity: it would be like us receiving a jolt of, say, 2500 G’s — instantly fatal.) That means that, if they were to travel interstellar distances, they would be restricted to small accelerations. And that, in turn, would mean that, even with their perception of time, trips would take the equivalent of very long times.
It would also mean that the species would find little of interest — and less in common — with the mayflies in the gravity wells. Possibly, the equivalent of our entomologists might study humanity for the few days our civilizations last.
Of course, you can, as Lessing did, simply posit such a species as a plot device. But you cannot, IMHO, then call such fiction “science” fiction. It’s fantasy. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but let’s not confuse the two.
(*NOTE: I’m relying on your description of Lessing’s thesis — I haven’t been able to get into them at all, and what little I read didn’t make an impression.) -
shortchain,
I don’t want to put words into filistro’s mouth (or fingers), but my perception of her suggestion was a bit different.
As we age and mature as individual humans, our perception of what a given span of time means tends to alter, because we have more time behind us to compare it to. I know I view “a year” very differently now than I did when I was, say, ten or fifteen or even thirty. If I’d gone on a year-long trip as a ten-year-old, it would have seemed a lifetime. Today, would be a longish vacation.
A five-year car loan when I was twenty seemed like forever, as if I was committing myself to forever being under the crushing weight of a life sentence. When I take out a five-year loan today, I’m already planning what I’ll do with all that extra cash in a mere 60 months when the car is paid off. Hell, I can nearly hold my breath for that long.
Similarly, I’d expect that for a species with lifespans in the thousands or millions of years, their view of what a century or a millennium means to them would be very different from what it means to us. It’s not that their perception of the passage of time has changed. It is that the meaning of the passage of time has changed.
As far as tolerance for acceleration, it’s all in waiting for it. A gentle acceleration of 1 g will bring you to 10% of the speed of light in only a year. Relativistic effects begin to kick in, and you can’t maintain that, but after only ten years at this gentle acceleration, you’re going to be moving as close to the speed of light as a creature needs, if that creature lives for a million years or so. It can travel anywhere in the galaxy.
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Thanks, DC… that’s exactly what I mean.
We need to step outside our own perceptions of time, gravity, speed, etc… all based on our experience here on earth, within our own tiny solar system.
Even here within this very limited scrap of matter that we live on, tucked way off on the edge of an insignificant little galaxy, we see enormous variety… species with a lifespan of hours, like some insects, and others that live thousands of years like redwood trees and certain fungi. We have species that only live in water, and others that can fly. We have every kind of reproduction from simple cell division to complex bi-sexual reproduction.
Imagine what mind-bending variations on those themes must exist throughout a vast universe (one that is, we now find, just a small part of an even-vaster multiverse!)
I don’t believe in a God that in any way resembles the Christian anthropomorphic trinity… but I believe in a Something. And I think the Something has gifted us with an eternal soul for a reason. I think we are on a cosmic journey through time and space, and in the course of it we will travel everywhere and see everything there is to see… and in some Cloud-like memory bank, somewhere, all these experiences are being stored and cataloged for our personal entertainment when eventually we are in a form and state that is able to access them.
This life here on the Little Blue Planet is fun and interesting… but I’m already excited to see what my next destination will be.
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#48 written by shortchain 9 months ago
DC,
It’s true that, as we get older, we develop a capacity to tolerate boredom (or develop means to avoid it), and also that our perception of the passage of time slows down a tad — but when faced with a span of tens of thousands of years, I truly doubt that applies.As for either sleeping through the passage of time or avoiding it through time dilation, that is not likely to be attractive to even a very long-lived species — at least, not for the purpose of simply traveling. You would arrive at your destination to find out that bell-bottoms were in fashion again, and all you have brought with you are boot-cut jeans.
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@DC… I wonder…how hard do I need to work in order to interest political
wonks in a subject of such importance to our history and to the
current shape of our nation? Shouldn’t the origins of religions
clearly be relevant to modern politics?
On GPS this morning, Peter Beinart just made a rather surprising statement. Or maybe it’s only surprising to me because it’s something I’ve believed for years, but haven’t heard enunciated quite so clearly until now.
Beinart believes religion, not economics or policy differences, lies at the heart of all American politics. He adds that in every demographic, the more religious segment of that demo leans Republican while the more secular the populace, the more strongly they lean Democratic.
And this, he says, is why Barack Obama will once again receive over 70% of Jewish American vote… not because of his views on Israel or Iran (or anything Mitt Romney says at the Wailing Wall) but simply because the American Jewish community is a much more secular group than the American average.