Author: Marc Alan Di Martino

A Nation Stricken with Grief

Asaf Ramon, the son of Ilan Ramon, was buried today next to his father in Israel’s Nahalal cemetery. Like his father, he was a captian in the IAF. Like his father, he wanted to be an astronaut. His father Ilan died in the Space Shuttle Columbia in 2003, which exploded upon re-entry.

Asaf’s fighter jet exploded during a routine training flight.

I’ve been working on and off on a poem about Ilan Ramon. After the explosion, scraps of his space diary were found on earth and pieced together by forensic scientists in Israel. It is an amazing story. I wonder how people can praise God in such situations, though.

Ronald Aronson on Gratitude

Here’s my thought for the day, which is a useful substitute for writing a new post. It comes from the book Living Without God, published last year by Counterpoint.

“Our daily survival and functioning depends on dozens, hundreds, thousands of links. We belong to family and to all the obvious structures, networks, and processes–of work, friends, neighborhood, city and nation (as well as natural environment)–and to a social universe of which we usually remain unconscious. If we train our awareness on how structures and networks and processes are actualized around the world, we will eventually notice those whose work daily makes our lives possible, just as our work in some small way contributes to making them and their lives possible–our interdependence.”

You can watch Aronson speak about his book here:

The Fuss Over American Grrrls

First I clicked here, then here, then here. Then I wrote my sister and asked whether Lucy had one of these. She wrote back saying that she did, but not one of those. I said, “You should get her one.” She agreed, and then it occurred to me that maybe I should get it for her instead. Be an uncle, I thought to myself.

He Was the Ed Sullivan of Italy

…and the Johnny Carson, Chuck Barris and Regis Philbin combined. RIP Mike Bongiorno.
The other guy
The other guy

Why Buddhism?

Many people I know like to define themselves as Buddhists. Apparently, is has become the most chic religion in the west, partly because it is not a religion in the monotheistic sense. As a moniker, it seems highly compatible with a personal quest for spirituality and tolerance for others. “I’m a Buddhist” is shorthand for “Your thing is cool with me, as long as my thing is cool with you.” Somehow, Buddhism is challenging secular humanism as the choice ideology of the non-religious.

Despite the much-heralded rise in traditional religious belief, our monotheisms are going through a tough phase. For one thing, they can no longer accomodate the worship of nonviolence. Read the Bible, read the Koran. Read the Iliad, for that matter. Humanity has, until fairly recently, always flaunted and celebrated its ability to shed blood. It meant power, wealth and posterity. And–for the record–it appears that animals do it, too.

But are we seeing Buddhism as it is, or as we wish it was? Robert D. Kaplan has a recent piece in The Atlantic about his travels in post-bellum Sri Lanka, which sheds some light on our conceptions:

Buddhism holds an exalted place in the half-informed Western mind. Whereas Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and Hinduism are each associated, in addition to their thought, with a rich material culture and a defended territory, Buddhism, despite its great monuments and architectural tradition throughout the Far East, is somehow considered purer, more abstract, and almost dematerialized: the most peaceful, austere, and uncorrupted of faiths, even as it appeals to the deeply aesthetic among us. Hollywood stars seeking to find themselves—famously Richard Gere—become Buddhists, not, say, orthodox Jews.

Well, they may not be deciding on orthodox Judaism, but many of them are drawn to things like Kabbalah for its promise of “spirituality.” The less daring go for a new-agey romp in Oprahland with The Secret. Barbara Ehrenreich has a new book out called Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, and I look forward to thumbing through it. 

Are we just looking for a bright-side which doesn’t exist outside of our own minds? Think Susan Boyle. Don’t think. Think again.

The End of Anonymity

Who are you?
Who are you?

I was catching up on Ron Rosenbaum’s recent posts when I came across this article about a super model who took her anonymous internet slanderer to court. She apparently pressed Google for the specifics (and got them), resulting in what they are calling the first case of anonymity-busting in internet history. True or not, I’m glad to see one of these anonymous bozos get whopped. There is too much abuse of anonymity–bloggers and commenters alike–and one day we will look back at now as the lawless frontier days of the early internet.

Of course, this doesn’t rule out the reality of those who are in real danger lest their identities be discovered (think Iran or China). But what these self-aggrandizing abusers are doing is damaging the online environment for those in real need of anonymous expression.  

Kevin Kelly, of Wired, wrote in Edge:

There’s a dangerous idea circulating that the option of anonymity should always be at hand, and that it is a noble antidote to technologies of control. This is like pumping up the levels of heavy metals in your body to make it stronger.

Privacy can be won only by trust, and trust requires persistent identity, if only pseudoanonymously. In the end, the more trust the better. Like all toxins, anonymity should be kept as close to zero as possible.

In a similar vein, Yaacov Lozowick suggests that the recent CiF Watch website–created to monitor the Comment is Free blog at the Guardian–would benefit from not being anonymous. He reasons thus:

The one quibble I have is their choice to remain anonymous. I’m not a fan of such decisions. They don’t live in Hamas-controlled Gaza, or Iran, or Egypt, or Syria, or all the many other places in the world where it’s dangerous to have an opinion.

Comment may be free, but opinion apparently is not.

The Obama-as-Hitler Meme and the Conspiratorial Mindset

Lexington writes:

Belief in conspiracy theories can be comforting. If everything that goes wrong is the fault of a secret cabal, that relieves you of the tedious necessity of trying to understand how a complex world really works. And you can feel smug that you are smart enough to “see through” the official version of events. But widespread paranoia has drawbacks. For a start, it makes calm, rational debate rather tricky. How can you discuss the trade-offs of health-care reform, for example, with someone who thinks the government is plotting to kill grandma?

The answer is, of course, you can’t. Which is the same reason you can’t teach a creationist evolution, or a Holocaust-denier twentieth-century history. Either they don’t want to know, or they’re so far gone down that winding road to nowhere that they can no longer process contrary information.

So, for the record, the Obama-as-Hitler meme appears not to be the imagined rantings of the Obamaniks. Nobody is saying all conservatives are wingnuts, but the wingnuts are out there and they are carrying Nazi paraphernalia diguised as “patriotism.”

Here’s the meme in all its glory (I never get tired of watching Frank nail this bozo to her seat):

The Case Against Creationism

Richard Dawkins has a new book out, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. An excerpt from it graced the Timesonline the other day, and Jonah Lehrer’s enthuisiastic review of it is here.

The elegance of evolution
The elegance of evolution

Dawkins writes:

Imagine that you are a teacher of Roman history and the Latin language, anxious to impart your enthusiasm for the ancient world — for the elegiacs of Ovid and the odes of Horace, the sinewy economy of Latin grammar as exhibited in the oratory of Cicero, the strategic niceties of the Punic Wars, the generalship of Julius Caesar and the voluptuous excesses of the later emperors. That’s a big undertaking and it takes time, concentration, dedication. Yet you find your precious time continually preyed upon, and your class’s attention distracted, by a baying pack of ignoramuses (as a Latin scholar you would know better than to say ignorami) who, with strong political and especially financial support, scurry about tirelessly attempting to persuade your unfortunate pupils that the Romans never existed. There never was a Roman Empire. The entire world came into existence only just beyond living memory. Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese, Catalan, Occitan, Romansh: all these languages and their constituent dialects sprang spontaneously and separately into being, and owe nothing to any predecessor such as Latin.

Instead of devoting your full attention to the noble vocation of classical scholar and teacher, you are forced to divert your time and energy to a rearguard defence of the proposition that the Romans existed at all: a defence against an exhibition of ignorant prejudice that would make you weep if you weren’t too busy fighting it.

If my fantasy of the Latin teacher seems too wayward, here’s a more realistic example. Imagine you are a teacher of more recent history, and your lessons on 20th-century Europe are boycotted, heckled or otherwise disrupted by well-organised, well-financed and politically muscular groups of Holocaust-deniers. Unlike my hypothetical Rome-deniers, Holocaustdeniers really exist. They are vocal, superficially plausible and adept at seeming learned. They are supported by the president of at least one currently powerful state, and they include at least one bishop of the Roman Catholic Church. Imagine that, as a teacher of European history, you are continually faced with belligerent demands to “teach the controversy”, and to give “equal time” to the “alternative theory” that the Holocaust never happened but was invented by a bunch of Zionist fabricators.

Dawkins is bound to come under scrutiny for daring to suggest that creationists are as intellectually dishonest–and downright dangerous–as Holocaust-deniers. Dawkins even coins a new term, history-deniers, to define them. After all, nearly everyone who insists upon a creationist reading of the universe (IDers included) does so for religious reasons, just as the Holocaust-deniers deny the irrefutable mountains of evidence stacked up against their claims for ideological reasons. Well, the bad news is that Holocaust-denial has gone international, while history-denial just won’t go away.

What 2012 Will Look Like in Times Square

Mayan zombies?
Mayan zombies?

The Borderlands of Jewishness

A few thoughts from a thoughtful reader (I’ve regularized some of the punctuation and uncapitalized the “A” in Atheist for obvious reasons):

Halacha, Jewish religious law, is the only thing that determines Jewish identity. And the issue is very clear indeed, and always has been. The Tanakh tells us that a Jew who adopts any other faith, is an ex-Jew. An Apostate. Now this does not – as in Islam – necessitate nor involve negativity towards this ex Jew. Not at all. But it’s just a statement of fact: a Jew who becomes a Christian = a Christian, just as a Jew who becomes a Muslim = a Muslim.

As for atheism:

Rabbis and Halacha are very clear on this too. Atheism doesn’t involve embracing another, conflicting faith. An atheist Jew, is simply a non practising Jew. Simple as that. Or, if the person prefers not to identity as Jewish, then the atheist is, well, an atheist, who was born into Judaism but has now left. But according to halacha, the atheist is still part of the Jewish family whereas the ex Jew turned Christian, or ex-Jew turned Muslim, is not.

Historically, Jews that converted to other faiths, and then later wished to return to Judaism, had to formally “convert” back to Judaism. I’m slightly concerned that your poll gives the impression that popular opinion can determine who is and is not Jewish. It can’t.

Also, as I’m sure you know, there is a specific Christian Evangelical movement, whose members were never Jews to start with, yet who pose fraudulently as ‘messianic Jews’ and who knowingly lie and misrepresent Judaism and Jews. This group provokes a lot of conflict between Jews and Christians.

For my part, I tend to be skeptical when any debate over Jewish identity is resolved by invoking the overriding authority of halakha. That’s part of what got us into this mess in the first place, and since non-Orthodox Jews are the majority these days (and the source of all that Jewish pride we feel when we talk about Spinoza, Freud, Einstein and Mel Brooks) I think we should have some say in the matter.

There are no easy answers. Nothing is “simple as that” about Jewish identity. Invoking the Tanakh–a collection of ancient Jewish literature otherwise known as the Hebrew Bible–as the fount of all wisdom on matters of personal or collective cultural identity is a push in the wrong direction. We all seem to agree that non-observant Jews are nonetheless Jews, and this fact alone proves the weakness of this argument.

I’m tempted to say that all of this is a matter of opinion. That we celebrate Spinoza (who was given a hearty herem, or  rabbinic excommunication, for heresy from Europe’s most liberal and enlightened Jewish community) as one of our greatest sons only points to the fallability of halakhic law. It is malleable, elastic even, and all it takes is a shift in the way we think about ourselves to tame the once mighty voice of the the Law. God, in the end, is as subject to shifting cultural sands as the marketplace.

From a non-theistic point of view, this all borders on silliness. We know that the Bible was written by men (and likely even women) and believe that there is no supernatural authority whose word is eternal and unchanging. If there were, where is such a word to be found? The Talmud itself would be heretical as it meddles with the Torah on almost every page, adding and subtracting according to the wisdom and convention of the day. Wouldn’t the Torah itself have been enough without the addenda of the prophetic and hagoigraphic books that round out the Tanakh? I hope this brief gloss will suffice to convince the reader that there is nothing simple or clear-cut about Jewish identity.

The poll I posted (Are Jews Who Believe in Jesus Still Jews?) seeks opinions to what is one of the taboos of mainstream Jewish discourse. It does not seek irrefutable answers. Why can a Jew be a Buddhist and not a Christian? Perhaps there is something “conflicting” is the idea of a Jewish-Christian, though the earliest Christians were without exception Jews. So, clearly, this is another cultural-historical construct with no guidelines grounded in religious absolutism. Such is the nature of cultural identity.

We know there are Jews who have embraced Christianity throughout history for various reasons, ranging from personal belief to the threat of death. We also live in a society in which religious and cultural identities are a smorgasbord. There may indeed be excellent reasons why a modern Jew cannot believe in Jesus Christ and still be considered a Jew by fellow Jews (and I believe there are) but let’s not defer our reasoning to the divine think tank to understand why this is so.