(We're not in) The Age of Reason

Inspired by the previously mentioned biography, I recently finished reading Thomas Paine's Age of Reason, written partly 1792-3 and partly around 1802.

I loved it!

It is a juicy, incisive, cogent, persuasive argument against organized religion, especially Bible-based religion, in favor of Deism.

Paine's argument is roughly as follows:

1) There can be no such thing as a written "revealed" Word of God. Because

• a) Human language intrinsically limits it -- E.g. If it is "revealed" in Hebrew, it loses something in the translation to English

• b) Written records are prone to changes, intentional or accidental

• c) Most importantly, short of the revelation being delivered personally to every individual, it must be treated as hearsay. And as hearsay, a believer would have to rely on the integrity of the message he or she receives. I.e. they would need to trust

• i) The person to whom the Word of God was revealed

• ii) The person who wrote down the revealed Word of God (which may or may not be the same as i)

• iii) All the people in intervening generations who had to pass the Word of God down correctly and unaltered (and translation is a particularly sticky point here)
  
  If you lose faith at any of these points, you must call into question your faith in the Word.
  

• d) And as a minor point, but one that I think was particularly insightful for a man of the 1700's: What about all the people who live on other planets or in other solar systems? Wouldn't the Word of God have to apply to them, too? But all of our candidate Words are pretty Earth-bound.

2) Ok...so you still think there can be a written revealed Word of God. Sorry but the Bible ain't it. Let's look at 1c more closely

• a) What reason do you have to trust the person to whom the Word of God was revealed? You can't possibly know him personally, nowadays. But ok...you trust him for whatever reason.

• b) Notwithstanding your trust in the person to whom it was revealed, what reason do you have to trust the person who wrote down the word?

• i) In most cases the person who wrote down the word was not the same as the person to whom the word was revealed. In some places this is openly acknowledged (as in the case of the Gospels), while in others Paine demonstrates that the purported authors cannot possibly be the actual authors, e.g. due to their referring to events that happened long after their death. He is particularly emphatic that Moses cannot be the author of the first 5 books of the old Testament that were attributed to him.

• ii) Paine also demonstrates that large swaths of the Bible were written down hundreds of years after the events they record took place. Plenty of time to get the Word or the facts wrong, even if the authors weren't actively trying to put on a political spin. Which they were.

• iii) If you accept that the Word of God must be literally true, then you must reject at very least portions of the Bible. It is absolutely full of logical and historical inconsistencies, so if you choose to believe one portion, you are obliged to accept that another portion is mistaken.

• c) Use your brain. Does this stuff sound like something that a benevolent, omnipotent God would want you to think about Him?

• i) Does Satan really have so much power that he can win over all humanity without God sacrificing a son? Doesn't that kind of make Satan more powerful than God?

• ii) Does a benevolent God really condone (or demand) collective punishments? Like making all of us suffer for Eve's mistake? Or like the assorted glorified genocides that involve gruesomely wiping out whole populations, including innocent babies?

• iii) Does an omnipotent God really need to resort to implausible devices (such as a virgin birth) that none of us can verify?

3) Ok, so you agree that the Bible isn't literally the Word of God, but you think it's divinely inspired, a good document to live by that sets a good moral example. I don't think so.

• a) Yes there are some good moral precepts in there, but they're mostly common sense, and are certainly common to other non-Bible-based religions, as well as most human societies. But follow these, by all means.

• b) There are some atrocious moral examples in there, too. Like the genocides mentioned above. It is simply more plausible to see these passages as after-the-fact self-aggrandizing historical revisionism written by the victors, than to continue to assert that they are divinely inspired and twist our notion of God to accept such injustice.

• c) If you're after good documents to live by with good moral examples, there are plenty of them, starting with some that are older than many good parts of the Bible (certainly than the New Testament)

4) Science is the true road to God

• a) If you want to know about God, don't rely on written words. Just look at natural law.

• i) It doesn't suffer the limitations of language -- it doesn't get lost in translation, it can't be altered maliciously or accidentally by humans

• ii) It is consistent with the notion of a benevolent God, and doesn't encourage us to commit genocide against each other

• iii) It doesn't require us to believe in it "just because I said so" regardless of implausibility - it is patently true

• b) It's much more awe inspiring to study nature than to take a load of nonsense "on faith".

This is a poor, deflated summary of the work. I couldn't possibly do justice to the sheer logic and entertaining presentation of the piece, not to mention the detailed analysis of Biblical events. I'm no Bible scholar, but the bits that I am familiar with jibe well with Paine's analysis, and I must say that I have generally felt the same horror and incredulity at the events described.

Paine's analysis had one extra point of interest for me. As a computer security nut, I noticed that many of his criticisms of the credibility of the Bible are precisely those we worry about in information security. How reliable is the information in your database? No more reliable than

• The information that goes in, in the first place (the guy to whom the Word was revealed)
• The people who manage to modify it (the guy who writes down the Word)
  
• Legitimately, in the course of their duties (the guy who really believes it)
  
• Maliciously, e.g. "crackers", disgruntled employees, etc. (the guy who puts a political spin on the Word)
  
• The programs that manipulate it (translation, copying, etc.)

My favorite books of 2007

Here are some of the books I enjoyed most this year, in no particular order:

1. Wicked by Gregory Maguire.
   
2. The Boleyn Inheritance by Phillipa Gregory
3. The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

Also enjoyed, but in a more qualified way:

1. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. An exploration of many kinds of social boundaries, told from the point of view of the ultimate fence-straddler -- a genetic hermaphrodite.
   
2. The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl. It is similar in flavor to The Alienist. It concerns a psychopath who is systematically inflicting the tortures of each circle of Dante's Inferno on targets that have personally offended him. Several distinguished poets and writers in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "Dante Club" are the only experts who know enough about Dante to recognize and anticipate the pattern, to catch him. I loved most of this story and except for the fizzle out ending, it would have made it to my first list.
3. Harry Potter 7. An enjoyable page turner, as always, but longer and more rambling than necessary (again, as usual). And I found the ending a bit too kiddie
4. The Constant Princess by Philippa Gregory. A fictionalization of the life of Catherine of Aragon. Gives historical perspective, in an entertaining way, as usual.
   
5. The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh. A very interesting story about the marginal existence of people living on the remote Sundurban Islands of India. Writing quality varies considerably, and there is a fairly high proportion of melodrama, which brings the book down to my second tier list, but I do recommend it.
6. Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie
   

I highly recommend that you stay away from:

1. The Darwin Conspiracy by John Darnton
2. The Poe Shadow by Matthew Pearl -- this was a big disappointment considering how much I liked The Dante Club.
3. Fury by Salman Rushdie
   

The House of Mirth

I just finished listening to a wonderful recording of The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton (narrated by Barbara Caruso other of whose recordings I have also enjoyed greatly...especially Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH).

I'd never read any Edith Wharton before but I must say that now I'm planning to.

This story of turn of the (20th) century New York concerns Miss Lily Bart, a "poor, miserable, marriageable girl" who is accustomed to the lap of luxury. Think of it as a Jane Austen set up, but much, much darker.

When we first meet Lily, she is scheming to marry wealthy, dull Mr. Percy Gryce. With her beauty, charm, and wiles, it should be a shoe-in. But just as she is about to clinch the deal, she ruins everything, by realizing how much more she enjoys being with an interesting man. Whom she doesn't want to marry because he can't support her in the style to which she has become accustomed.

Lily has been a poor dependent of wealthy friends and relations for the past 10 years or so. As her name suggests, she has been brought up in wealth as a fragile, ornamental young lady, dependent on all the resources of a hothouse to fully blossom. That is until she is thrust into poverty by her father's economic ruin and death. She lives by making herself useful in various ways to the pleasure-seeking leisure class ladies in her circle, and so, acquires the both the tastes and expensive needs of associating with the rich. Because of her extraordinary beauty and charm she has never lacked suitors. But here lies the problem -- she's just too picky. And like many beautiful, charming young women, she finds that her assets also make her a target for many kinds of insult and victimization.

We watch as one scheme after another that she formulates for her economic preservation falls apart, due to malice, bad luck, misunderstanding, lack of communication or arbitrary social rules that hamper young women. Though some of the factors that contribute to Lily's plight would no longer be relevant today, I think most of them would. But what makes the book so powerful is that Lily's growing backbone is what causes the pillars of her world to crumble, and we weep that her strength is not properly valued.

At the beginning I thought I would hate the story...Miss Bart seems at first such an unsympathetic, spoiled, conniving little gold-digger. But it didn't take long to get me interested. And by the end...well...I am not, in general, a crier, but I must say, I did tear up. I loved every bit of the book except the ending, which I disagree with. Without giving a spoiler, all I can say is that that I think Edith Wharton wrote the ending that Lily would have wanted, but I as a reader found it unsatisfying. I wanted more poetic justice.

I will add that on the strength of my taste for the book, I borrowed the 2000 movie of the same name, starring Gillian Anderson. Don't bother. While it is fairly faithful to the dialog of the book, and the costumes are nice, the acting is pretty bad. And they made some fairly critical plot changes for no better reason that I can see than to save money by cutting down on the number of roles.

My contribution to the Halloween Spirit

For your amusement (or my own) I posted a picture puzzle to allstarpuzzles.com

It's pretty tough :-)

Thomas Paine: Someone you should get to know

I just read a fairly painful biography of Thomas Paine (Thomas Paine: Enlightenment, Revolution, and the Birth of the Modern Nations by Craig Nelson). However, despite the technical difficulty of getting through the text, I'm really glad I stuck it out, just for the sake of getting to know about this amazing individual.

I will be the first to admit that my knowledge of American History is shamefully thin. So forgive me if I go mushy about something everyone else already knows. I've decided they should assign Common Sense as required reading in high school American History, and I'm looking forward to reading Rights of Man.

Paine was a revolutionary among revolutionaries, a visionary among visionaries. In a community of extraordinary enlightenment thinkers, he was able to surpass all of their abilities to break out of the prejudices of the age.

This is a man who could see past monarchy in a time when it was taken for granted. Not so special...all of those revolutionaries did. But unlike those more commonplace icons like Washington and Jefferson and Hamilton, etc., he also championed universal suffrage (i.e. not property-based voting rights), abolitionism, feminism, something like Social Security and a one-time grant to young adults to start out in life. And he got himself into a lot of trouble for advocating Deism as opposed to the more narrow organized Christianity.

The breadth of his knowledge and vision is mind-boggling. He designed working bridges, wrote on economics, political science, religion, law. In his own time his writings were both blockbuster best-sellers and banned on two continents. Though he could have gotten rich on his published works, he deliberately refused royalties, in order to reduce the printing costs and make his work accessible to all. He was an active participant in both the American and French Revolutions (and was even a legislator in France until things got really nutty, when he was locked up for 8 months, escaping execution by a sheer accident).

His advanced thinking got him many friends in the most advanced circles. But his intellectual honesty also ended up alienating many of those same friends, as they could not or did not care to understand his meanings. In addition, interested parties published twisted interpretations of his works, which often created violent mobs against them.

As a society we nominally espouse many of the principles first set forth by Thomas Paine. But if he were to come back today and state the same things he did then, I suspect he'd still be controversial, misunderstood and condemned. Can you imagine anyone today proposing that every young adult should, as a right, be officially handed, let's say, $10,000 so that they could start a business or go to college or do whatever they needed to, to become a productive member of society?

I found this particular biography (which I actually listened to on CD) very hard to follow. It roughly follows the major chunks of his life: early life in England to age 37 in 1774; participation in the American revolution; return to Enlightenment gentleman's life in England; participation in the French Revolution; and return to America. But within these chunks, the text jumps around a lot in time, and not for any good reason, as far as I can see. The jumps seemed to me more like a stream of consciousness rather than in the interests of following any clear themes. The one thing that I found extremely valuable about the book is that it quotes liberally from Paine's works and correspondence, which really gave a good feel for his ideas and his historical context. Amazon reviewers gave the book 4 1/2 stars, though, so maybe my frustration is just because I generally don't read history books.

As one tidbit of trivia, after reading some of this material, I realized that there are several references to Paine's works in the preamble to The MTA Song (which you can listen to here)

I'm adding Thomas Paine to my list of people I'd like to meet, if they ever invent a time machine.

Labor Day Greetings

I was cleaning out my email spam folder when I noticed something surprising. I had several spam emails with the subject "Happy Labor Day" and "Labor Day e-Card".

Now, do I actually believe that the emails actually had something to do with Labor Day? Of course not. Did I even click through to the links in the emails, to see what they were really trying to sell me? Certainly not.

What I found interesting, though, was the fact that some spammer actually thought that Labor Day was something that would get a victim's attention. Spam subjects often address deep human fears: Body part size. Accessibility of prescription drugs. Finding Love. And now...labor.

I did a whois search at Sam Spade for the URLs that were linked in the message, and it looks like they lead back to US service providers. In other words, the originators of this particular spam do not seem to be in Eastern Europe or Nigeria or whatever. This would appear to be home grown, culturally-sensitive spam.

Apparently spammers are betting that Americans are starting to recognize that their labor is something to worry about or maybe even celebrate. Why else spam about it?

You might answer my observation by pointing out that spammers simply thought that people, having a day off, would be more likely to be on their computers and responding to spam. But I don't recall ever receiving a Memorial Day greeting or a July 4th greeting or even a New Year's greeting. Labor Day seems to be something special that spammers are guessing would attract people's attention. In my books, that's a good sign.

US Maternal Mortality rate on the rise

The US maternal mortality rate (essentially the rate of women dying from childbirth-related causes) was reported as 13 per 100,000 live births for 2004, up from 12 per 100,000 in 2003, which according to this article was the first time since 1977 that it was above 10.

Let's compare that with our neighbors to the north...an otherwise similar culture, by most accounts. WHO cites Canada's maternal mortality rate as 4 per 100,000 live births in 2000.

The US rise in maternal mortality is attributed to (among other things)

• a whopping 29% C-section rate
  
• obesity
• changes in how maternal mortality is reported
• older women having children

The first two factors, at very least, are highly addressable.

This is unforgiveable.

There will not be two moons on August 27

A couple of days ago, someone forwarded me a message claiming that Mars would be so close to earth on August 27 that it would look as large as the full moon. Unfortunately, the message neglected to mention that this would require a telescopic lens of about 75 power magnification, and that the date was actually August 27, 2003.

When I received this message, I did what I always do when I receive emails (from otherwise intelligent individuals) containing outrageous claims or stories of crime victims with morals about precautions I should take in the future. I looked it up on Snopes.

Snopes is one of my favorite sites on the net. It is dedicated to debunking various urban legends and hoaxes. It is clearly written and usually provides lots of documentation of the source of legends as well as how they are debunked. I like this site so much that I've added it to my list of recommended links (see on the right of this page).

Sure enough, the Mars story was there. You can take a look at it at http://www.snopes.com/science/mars.asp complete with the email I received. It seems this story resurfaces pretty often. I guess it's like those "Confidential message for Dawn regarding hidden funds in Swiss Bank" emails -- there's always someone new out there who hasn't seen them yet, and might actually fall for it.

Eat your weeds!

Every spring, as I clear out my vegetable patch in preparation for the new crop of weeds, I inevitably find large quantities of a strange little plant. If Jade Plant grew in a vine, this is what it would look like. It grows close to the ground, with long fat reddish runners and little clumps of fat shiny leaves. And it seems to grow almost overnight. No sooner do I clear out an area than after the next rain, there is a spider network of this weed over the entire clearing.

A couple of weeks ago, in researching another weed, I found out that this is Common Purslane (Portulaca oleracea).

It is apparently edible, and in fact, not merely edible, but highly nutritious, loaded with uncommon quantities of Vitamin E, Vitamin C and Omega 3 fatty acids, along with various other desirable micronutrients. It is eaten in Europe, Asia, Latin America. Leave it to us to ignore it!

Several days ago, I made the experiment. Luckily, this baby seems to be an all season kind of plant, so I went into my prodigious weed crop and dug around among the tomatoes. Sure enough...there was plenty of this purslane stuff. I pulled up a bunch of clumps, washed them well, and started right in.

Raw, the stems are slightly tangy. Some of the leaves are, too, but many are just kind of spinachy flavored. The stems have a somewhat slimy quality, sort of like cooked okra, but not quite as much.

Most of the harvest got cooked in a spicy sour soup (tamarind, mustard seed, sesame base) usually reserved for spinach or another leaf vegetable whose English name I don't know. It was quite good! The slimy quality of the stems is somewhat accentuated in soup form, which for me is a good thing.

I declare this experiment a success!

Who knew?

College Admissions and Discrimination

This is a very interesting and entertaining article on the history of the college admissions process, forwarded to me by a high school classmate. (http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/10/10/051010crat_atlarge)

It discusses how non-objective criteria have been used historically for discriminatory purposes. It starts with a discussion of how Harvard initially relied rather heavily on the College Boards, but backed away when it found it was inadvertently admitting too many Jews. In place of the "objective" test-based criteria, it instituted letters of reference, admissions interviews and complex application processes, weighting highly the features of "desirable" candidates.

The article seems to be arguing for a return to straight rankings for college admissions. I'm not sure I'd totally agree with this approach. It seems to me that the right goal is Diversity in college admissions. Which is not well served by lots of testing. The "Desirable" students that an elitist school wants to screen for often come from families who can afford plenty of test prep.