The Questioning Christian

Religious people make better citizens, says new study

From The Christian Century:

The scholars say their studies found that religious Americans are three to four times more likely to be involved in their community than nonreligious Americans. They are more apt to work on community projects, belong to voluntary associations, attend public meetings, vote in local elections, attend protest demonstrations and political rallies and donate time and money to causes—including secular ones.

At the same time, Putnam and Campbell say, their data show that religious people are "nicer": they carry packages for people, don't mind folks cutting ahead in lines and give money to panhandlers.

The scholars say the link between religion and civic activism is causal, since they observed that people who hadn't attended church became more engaged after they did. "These are huge effects," Putnam said.

The reason for the increased civic engagement may come as a surprise to religious leaders. It has nothing to do with ideas of divine judgment or with trying to secure a seat in heaven. Rather, it's the relationships that people make in their churches, mosques, synagogues and temples that draw them into community activism.

Putnam calls them "supercharged friends," and the more such friends people have, the more likely they are to participate in civic events, he says. The theory is that if someone from your "moral community" asks you to volunteer for a cause, it's really hard to say no. "Being asked to do something by a member of your congregation is different from being asked to do something by a member of your bowling league," Putnam said.

The effect of these friendships is so strong, the scholars found, that people who attend religious services regularly but don't have any friends there look more like secularists than like fellow believers when it comes to civic participation.

"It's not faith that accounts for this," Putnam said. "It's faith communities."

Daniel Burke, Congregants make better citizens, says new study, The Christian Century, June 16, 2009, p. 16 (bold-faced emphasis added).

Human evolution is speeding up – Stephen Hawking

[Stephen] Hawking says that we have entered a new phase of evolution. "At first, evolution proceeded by natural selection, from random mutations. This Darwinian phase, lasted about three and a half billion years, and produced us, beings who developed language, to exchange information."

But what distinguishes us from our cave man ancestors is the knowledge that we have accumulated over the last ten thousand years, and particularly, Hawking points out, over the last three hundred.

"I think it is legitimate to take a broader view, and include externally transmitted information, as well as DNA, in the evolution of the human race," Hawking said.

- From Stephen Hawking: "Humans Have Entered a New Stage of Evolution," in The Daily Galaxy.

Tracking blog comments via delicious.com

I've got a crude but effective lash-up to keep track of comment threads on other blogs such as TitusOneNine. Here’s how to create a similar set-up for yourself.

1. Sign up for a free account with the famous delicious.com. This isn’t a fly-by-night Web site; they’ve been around for years, and are now owned by Yahoo.

2. Install the delicious.com bookmarklet in your browser’s toolbar. If you want, rename the bookmarklet to something short; in my set-up, it’s “BkMk – del” (see the picture below).

3. Whenever you read a blog post with comments you want to follow:

• While on the blog-post page, click on your new delicious.com bookmarklet, which in my case is named “BkMk – del”. 
• When the delicious.com screen comes up, you should see the title and URL of the blog post already filled in – see the picture below.
• Fill in the “tag” field with the word "comments" (or whatever).

4. To get a list of blog posts you’re following, go to the delicious.com page for your account that’s filtered for just your “comments” tag.  The URL will be http://delicious.com/[yourusername]/comments.  You’ll see all the posts you’ve tagged with “comments.”

• You can drag the URL from the browser’s address field into your toolbar; this will create a bookmark – see the “Cmts” in the picture below.

5. When you’re done following a particular blog post’s comments, go to your delicious.com comment page and click on the link to delete that page from your “comments” list – see picture below.

.

The difference between the Trinity and the Tooth Fairy

Q: What’s the difference between the Trinity and the Tooth Fairy?  A:

• A quarter under your pillow is more reliable supporting evidence than we’ve ever had about the Trinity;
• The grown-ups eventually stop insisting the Tooth Fairy story is true.

(This occurred to me while responding to Harrison’s comment on my earlier posting, The Trinity is an impediment to evangelism.)

Related posts:

• Why I Still Call Myself a Christian and an Episcopalian
• Resurrection Appearances: What Did the Disciples Really Experience?

Science is necessarily atheistic (but of course, that’s not necessarily the end of the inquiry)

Cosmologist Lawrence M. Krauss writes in today’s Wall Street Journal:

J.B.S. Haldane, an evolutionary biologist and a founder of population genetics, understood that science is by necessity an atheistic discipline. As Haldane so aptly described it, one cannot proceed with the process of scientific discovery if one assumes a "god, angel, or devil" will interfere with one's experiments. God is, of necessity, irrelevant in science.

Faced with the remarkable success of science to explain the workings of the physical world, many, indeed probably most, scientists understandably react as Haldane did. Namely, they extrapolate the atheism of science to a more general atheism.

While such a leap may not be unimpeachable it is certainly rational, as Mr. McGinn pointed out at the World Science Festival. … [T]he scientific process … is in fact rationally incompatible with the detailed tenets of most of the world's organized religions. [¶¶]

(Emphasis added.)

Of course, the atheists can’t categorically rule out another possibility, held out by others such as scientist-theologian John Polkinghorne, namely that ‘God’ might interact with the world in ways that we simply lack the capability to understand or even observe, perhaps at the level of quantum mechanics.

That doesn’t mean we should premise significantly-risky decisions on the assumption that God acts in the world, only that it’s important not to get locked into an anti-religious dogma that insists he does not.

And indeed, Krauss nails it when he says, "The current crisis in Iran has laid bare the striking inconsistency between a world built on reason and a world built on religious dogma.”  The same would seem to apply to any variety of dogma.

Our collective experience helps us compensate for the fallibilities of our individual observations and insights

I've been involved in a week-long discussion at Kendall Harmon’s conservative Anglican site TitusOneNine. My online friend Todd Granger, M.D., responded to one of my comments thusly:

... all knowledge - all knowledge - involves a personal decision to commit oneself to an epistemological framework in the absence of compelling a priori evidence to make the decision. There is no Cartesian point of objectivity from which one may serenely decide between frameworks.

Here's a slightly-edited version of my response.

It seems to me that Todd is saying each of us must choose his or her epistemological framework. That strikes me as saying we must each choose our own truth. I don't think either claim is defensible.

I would argue that, so far as we can tell, there's a single reality, wrought by the Creator (though sometimes different people perceive that reality in different slices, or from different perspectives).

Likewise, there's a single epistemology, a single approach to assessing what we know and how we know it: As best we can, face the facts of reality as they’re revealed to us — keeping in mind that those facts include the limitations of our abilities to perceive, correlate, remember, and communicate.

As near as I can tell, the post-modernist view maintains that our limitations require that we abandon the notion of objective reality.  That doesn’t seem correct.

Our knowledge of reality isn’t a painting that each of us must examine in the moment, alone and in a vacuum, with no information about the depicted scene except as supplied by our imaginations.

Thanks to our gifts of "memory, reason, and skill" (Eucharistic Prayer C, if memory serves) — especially the skill of communicating with each other — our knowledge base is more like a movie: Our past experience, individual and collective, allows us to know more about the scene than could ever be depicted by a painter.

Consider that over millennia, humanity has accumulated gazillions of observations of the Creation.

Individually, each observation is subject to error in perception, recordation, transmission, and/or interpretation.

Collectively, though, our accumulated observations — including meta-observations about how we make and use observations — can give us something like a serviceable facsimile, within its limitations, of the Cartesian point of objectivity Todd describes.

In The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki tells of a surprising observation by statistician Francis Galton; as explained by an Amazon.com reviewer:

In 1906, Francis Galton, known for his work on statistics and heredity, came across a weight-judging contest at the West of England Fat Stock and Poultry Exhibition. This encounter was to challenge the foundations of his life's study.

An ox was on display and for six-pence fair-goers could buy a stamped and numbered ticket, fill in their names and their guesses of the animal's weight after it had been slaughtered and dressed. The best guess received a prize.

Eight hundred people tried their luck. They were diverse. Many had no knowledge of livestock; others were butchers and farmers.

In Galton's mind this was a perfect analogy for democracy. He wanted to prove the average voter was capable of very little.

Yet to his surprise, when he averaged the guesses, the total [sic] came to 1197 pounds. After the ox had been slaughtered, it weighted 1198.

Emphasis and extra paragraphing added.)

Surowiecki gives several other examples — including how the sunken submarine USS SCORPION was located — to illustrate the point: If each of a (sufficiently-large) number of 'observations' includes a randomly-distributed error component, and the observations are mashed together, e.g., by averaging them, then the error components tend to cancel each other out, and the resulting collective picture can be a serviceable representation of the underlying reality.

I'm now bumping up against the limits of my (scant) knowledge of epistemology. It seems to me, though, that Galton's story of guessing the weight of an ox is a useful metaphor for how our collective experience over time helps us compensate for the lack of an a priori frame of reference.

(If I'm not mistaken, what I've described above is a crude summary of the notion of critical realism.)

Love God, love your neighbor: two hinges on a door

An semi-anonymous commenter at TitusOneNine who goes by "mig+" (the plus sign usually signifies that s/he is a priest) offers a thought-provoking metaphor for the Summary of the Law, about which I've written here before:

Since Jesus says there are two commandments from which the divine guidance hangs, I suppose Jesus imagined the Law and the Prophets as a door pivoting on two hinges.

Formerly I was a cabinetmaker and I can tell you it doesn’t make much difference whether a top or bottom hinge is broken. Either way the door won’t work (show the way).

I think the point Jesus was making is that love of God and love of neighbor are inseparable.

(Extra paragraphing added.)

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Related posts:

• It's time to ditch the traditional Christian story: Another way for followers of Jesus to look at history
• A response to an inquiring non-believer

Iran events

I'm no foreign-affairs expert, but it does seem to me that the election in Iran, and the participation of the populace via Twitter and Facebook, may be signaling a viral-like spread of the democratic values of free elections fairly counted, free speech, and free assembly (real or virtual). It's exciting to watch.

A brief meditation about a civilized prison – NY Times

I’ve long wondered whether imprisonment, especially for long terms in unpleasant conditions, is the most effective ‘industry-standard’ consequence for criminal behavior. In the NY Times Magazine, Jim Lewis writes of a strikingly-‘civilized’ prison in Austria, musing about how American prisons came to be the way they are, and wondering whether “to borrow a phrase from a Conservative British home secretary, [prison] has been ‘an expensive way of making bad people worse.’”

Excerpt:

Does imprisonment work? It seems like a bottom-line question, but the answer depends on what you want prisons to do, and that’s not an easy thing to decide. * * *

…  most crimes are committed either in the heat of the moment or by career criminals who consider themselves invincible. Few people in either group think about where they might wind up.

When I asked one of the prisoners at Leoben if he was surprised by how nice it was, he said no; what surprised him was that he’d been caught in the first place.

In fact, though most of us are reluctant to admit it, we mainly use prisons as storage containers, putting people there with the hope that, if nothing else, five years behind bars means five years during which they can’t commit more crimes.

It’s called warehousing, and we do a lot of it.

[Emphasis in original, extra paragraphing added.]

Read it all.

Confidence sometimes counts for more than being right

From New Scientist:

The research, by Don Moore of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, shows that we prefer advice from a confident source, even to the point that we are willing to forgive a poor track record. Moore argues that in competitive situations, this can drive those offering advice to increasingly exaggerate how sure they are. And it spells bad news for scientists who try to be honest about gaps in their knowledge.

In Moore's experiment, volunteers were given cash for correctly guessing the weight of people from their photographs. In each of the eight rounds of the study, the guessers bought advice from one of four other volunteers. The guessers could see in advance how confident each of these advisers was (see table), but not which weights they had opted for.

From the start, the more confident advisers found more buyers for their advice, and this caused the advisers to give answers that were more and more precise as the game progressed.  This escalation in precision disappeared when guessers simply had to choose whether or not to buy the advice of a single adviser.

In the later rounds, guessers tended to avoid advisers who had been wrong previously, but this effect was more than outweighed by the bias towards confidence.

Peter Aldhous, Humans prefer cockiness to expertise, New Scientist, June 10, 2009 (emphasis and extra paragraphing added.)

The Trinity is an impediment to evangelism

For many nonbelievers and doubters (‘NBDs’), the church’s mulish insistence on the doctrine of the Trinity is one of the major stumbling blocks to faith.* 

The orthodox proclaim: If you don’t accept that God is three Persons in One, then you simply cannot be a true Christian. Granted, we can’t point you to any objective reason to believe this, but you still must accept it, purely on our say-so — some of our early founders imagined it to be true, which is good enough for us, and it should be good enough for you.

Many thoughtful NBDs are put off by this approach. They know, from education and experience, that such unsubstantiated appeals to authority are typically bootless.

The orthodox seem not to care. (Nor do they evidence much interest in the most obvious of the questions that can be raised about the Trinity:  Why three Persons?  Why not two, or four, or four million?) 

Instead, they blithely continue doing their evangelism rain dances, oblivious to whether they’re actually making it rain.

(* FOOTNOTE:  I use ‘faith’ here in a minimalist sense, namely (i) accepting that a Creator exists and (ii) trusting that, in the end, all will be well. It seems to me that this is precisely the kind of faith that the New Testament shows Jesus as exemplifying and urging others to seek.)

Would You Slap Your Father? If So, You’re a Liberal

Nicholas Kristof writes:

Studies suggest that conservatives are more often distressed by actions that seem disrespectful of authority, such as slapping Dad. Liberals don’t worry as long as Dad has given permission.

Likewise, conservatives are more likely than liberals to sense contamination or perceive disgust. People who would be disgusted to find that they had accidentally sipped from an acquaintance’s drink are more likely to identify as conservatives.

The upshot is that liberals and conservatives don’t just think differently, they also feel differently. This may even be a result, in part, of divergent neural responses.

Read it all, especially toward the end, concerning possible evolutionary bases for these divergent reactions – and how to compensate for them.

The man who could have been Bill Gates

From the Oral History Gets Distorted desk:  Hacker News * links today to a 2004 Business Week story, recounting the vastly-different accounts of how Microsoft entered into its original operating-system license agreement with IBM, which started Bill Gates on the road to being a billionaire.

Legend has it that IBM initially approached software pioneer Gary Kildall, seeking to license his widely-used CP/M operating system, but Kildall wasn’t interested (“Gary went flying instead,” goes the story). Whereupon IBM asked Gates whether MIcrosoft could do the job; Microsoft bought the rights to a CP/M workalike; and the rest is history.

But the legend leaves out some crucial details . . . .

Read it all.

* Hacker News is a legitimate and very-popular site for ‘hackers’ in the original sense of the term, which refers to highly-skilled programmers.

Yup, we did indeed ‘steal’ the priestly blessing

At the Episcopal High School baccalaureate service last night, we sat next to longtime friends who are Jewish. Their name is Cohn.  Our bishop coadjutor gave the priestly blessing at the end.  As we were leaving, I turned to the husband and said, “That blessing was your line of work — the family business — right?” He laughed and said “When I heard the blessing, I thought ‘they stole that!’” 

Surprised by joy in liturgy

My liturgical taste could be described as low-church, almost Quaker. I have a fairly strong dislike for pageantry, constant singing, and other fol-de-rol in parish worship. I can't help but think, let's get down to business, get it done, and get back to work. Probably a bad attitude, but that's my reaction.

Last night, though, my wife and I attended our daughter's baccalaureate service at Episcopal High School. The procession — graduates in their caps and gowns, sanctuary party in vestments — was led by a verger. The student choir, also vested, sang much of the liturgy, which was straight-up Evening Prayer right out of the BCP.  (They did a fabulous job.)

To my surprise, I was strangely pleased by the moderately-high-church tone. It wasn't ostentatious, just ... traditional.

Then a possible reason dawned on me. We were sitting next to old friends whose son is also graduating.  They're Jewish. I realized I was glad they were getting to see a traditional Episcopal liturgy, of the kind I'm sure they'd seen before on TV during presidential funerals.  Even more so, I was glad they could participate in much of the service, given that large portions of Evening Prayer are taken straight from the Hebrew Bible a.k.a. the Old Testament.

I very much like that about the Episcopal Church:  Its liturgy asserts the congregation's claim to being an integral part of the people of God, present and past; at the same time, the liturgy serves as the verbal equivalent of the famous street sign, The Episcopal Church Welcomes You.

Brain scans suggest maybe Jesus isn't the only way to God after all

From part 3 of an NPR series on religion and the brain, by Barbara Bradley Hagerty:

When Baime [a Buddhist monk] meditated in Newberg's brain scanner, his brain mirrored those feelings [of timelessness and oneness with the universe]. As expected, his frontal lobes lit up on the screen: Meditation is sheer concentration, after all. But what fascinated Newberg was that Baime's parietal lobes went dark.

"This is an area that normally takes our sensory information, tries to create for us a sense of ourselves and orient that self in the world," he explains. "When people lose their sense of self, feel a sense of oneness, a blurring of the boundary between self and other, we have found decreases in activity in that area."

Newberg found that result not only with Baime, but also with other monks he scanned. It was the same when he imaged the brains of Franciscan nuns praying and Sikhs chanting. They all felt the same oneness with the universe. When it comes to the brain, Newberg says, spiritual experience is spiritual experience.

"There is no Christian, there is no Jewish, there is no Muslim, it's just all one," Newberg says.

A little theological dynamite there — but, remember, the research is just beginning.

(Emphasis added.)

The proper response to sin is not excessive sorrow or self-loathing, but an effort to learn and do better

"My religion rains obligations, but it is notably free, except in some of its more stringent and sectarian versions, of the worst terrors of sin. The compassion is even in the etymology: in Hebrew, the arrow that misses its target 'sins' against it.[1] The proper response to imperfection is not despair. It is another arrow."

-–Leon Wieseltier, Washington Diarist: My Secret Life, The New Republic, June 3, 2009, p. 48 (emphasis and footnote added).

[1] DCT note:  The Hebrew word for ‘sin’ is het, to err or miss the mark; ditto the Greek hamartia [link]. Likewise, the Greek word usually translated as ‘repentance’ is metanoia, a change of mind and heart.

Funny-but-horrifying techie cartoon

This techie cartoon is funny-but-horrifying (and punny) in several ways:

Harvard longitudinal study confirms the distorting effects of time on stories recalled from memory

Here’s some hard evidence showing the questionable reliability of stories that are recalled long after the fact — something that credulous New Testament scholars (like Bishop N.T. Wright) would be well-advised to keep in mind when they claim that X or Y really did happen in 33 AD:

… The Harvard data illustrate this phenomenon [of memory distortion] well.

In 1946, for example, 34 percent of the Grant Study men who had served in World War II reported having come under enemy fire, and 25 percent said they had killed an enemy. In 1988, the first number climbed to 40 percent—and the second fell to about 14 percent.

“As is well known,” Vaillant concluded, “with the passage of years, old wars become more adventurous and less dangerous.”

Distortions can clearly serve a protective function. In a test involving a set of pictures, older people tend to remember fewer distressing images (like snakes) and more pleasant ones (like Ferris wheels) than younger people.

By giving a profound shape to aging, this tendency can make for a softer, rounder old age, but also a deluded one. …

From Joshua Wolf Shenk, What Makes Us Happy? in The Atlantic, June 2009 (emphasis and extra paragraphing added).

Related posts: 

• Reasons to Question the Reliability of Scripture
• The Distortions category of this blog

Red House furniture commercial: Maybe society is getting more so-what about our racial diversity

The Red House furniture store in North Carolina has a truly schlocky commercial on YouTube, explaining how their furniture is good for white people and for black people. It caught the eye of CNet correspondent Chris Matyszczyk as possibly the worst video on YouTube.  I’m not so sure about that.

In a weird sort of way, I kinda like this. Here’s why:  If advertisers chasing a buck are becoming less inclined to tiptoe around racial differences, pretending they don't exist, it could mean that society as a whole is gradually getting more so-what about race. That would not be a bad thing at all, IMHO. 

In the same general category, I’m glad to see the increasing number of bad-guy roles, on TV and in the movies, that seem to be played by black actors. I hope this means that casting directors are less inclined to restrict those roles — and their paychecks — to white actors for fear of being branded a racist.

Of course, the Red House furniture store is probably thrilled that their commercial is going viral ….

Pakistani nukes: The Taliban probably don’t care about ‘sovereignty’

From the Wall Street Journal online, reporting about Pakistani president Zardari’s appearance on Meet the Press:  “Asked about the location of Pakistan's nuclear-weapons cash [sic], Zardari declined to reveal the sites, saying it was a ‘sovereign issue.’”

I have this nagging feeling that, when it comes to grabbing the Pakistani nukes, the Taliban might not be so punctilious about ‘sovereign issues.’

Choosing a congregation: Whom do I want to bury me?

Rodney Clapp writes in The Christian Century: “A while ago someone suggested to me that the best way to choose a congregation is to ask oneself: Are these the people I want to bury me?”  Blessed be the ties that bind, The Christian Century, May 5, 2009, p.61.

Clapp goes on to compare what he calls the ‘Catholic’ and ‘Protestant’ attitudes toward church membership and commitment.

It’s worth a read.

Muslim extremists’ narrative of grievance may be an evolutionary side effect of altruistic punishment

Islamic extremism is just one of countless movements that “create[] a collective identity by appealing to a set of common grievances and create[] a master narrative of suffering and oppression.” [1]   It’s possible that this tendency to frame the world in terms of a narrative of grievance is something of an evolutionary side effect of an otherwise-useful trait.

The trait:  Natural selection appears to have hard-wired us to seek to punish unfairness, even at a cost to ourselves, because doing so tends to promote group fitness.  This is often called altruistic punishment. 

The side-effect:  Consciously or not, movements that cast their sales pitches in terms of ‘the unfairness of it all’ are making a smart move, because it so often works.

(It’s not unlike sugary cereal manufacturers who discovered that they could increase sales by positioning their wares on the lower shelves, that is, at eye level for kids riding in their parents’ shopping carts.)

Our willingness to punish unfairness may partially explain why we can be so quick to buy into narratives in which —

1. the members of our group (whatever that might be) are entitled to certain things;
2. when we don’t get those supposed entitlements, it’s not merely the luck of the draw, a poor choice of parents, a consequence of past decisions, etc.  No — it’s unfair, a distortion of the cosmic fabric, a case of Life Not Being The Way It’s Supposed To Be;
3. our hard-wired response to any perceived unfairness is to identify those at fault and punish them.

Putting it another way: if a hammer is one of your primary tools, an awful lot of things can start to look like nails. 

This might also help to explain why anger at Those At Fault often seems more emotionally satisfying than the hard work of facing the facts about the things we don’t like and trying to do something constructive about them.

Related post:

• Good News, Bad News: Sin as Evolutionary Side Effect?

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[1] Reza Aslan in an interview in the Houston Chronicle (emphasis added).  Aslan is author of No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam (2005) and the just-published How to Win a Cosmic War: God, Globalization, and the End of the War on Terror.  It’s not hard to think of other examples of group identities that are built on, or reinforced by, a narrative of grievance; think of extremists in, for example, North Korea; Serbia; the political parties of various countries; the Episcopal Church; etc., etc.  (And I’m not even going to mention some other obvious examples from history.)

Here’s a news flash: Authors will sometimes lie and defame if they think it will help advance their agenda

In today’s on-line WSJ, a piece by Mark Penn caught my attention:

The United Kingdom has just had a major scandal in which an official at 10 Downing Street had planned to leak to a friendly blogger all sorts of lurid stories about the Conservatives, complete with descriptions of secret sex tapes.

But all of it was to be made up, and the friendly blogger who was going to post it all thought it was an “absolutely brilliant” idea.

Someone blew the whistle, but had the plot gone through, this blogstorm could have played a major role in the upcoming election.

America's Newest Profession: Bloggers for Hire, Wall Street Journal, Apr. 21, 2009 (emphasis and extra paragraphing added).  I searched for more on this UK story and found a Guardian article:

Damian McBride sent the first of two emails that would cost him his job at 6.30pm on 13 January. "A few ideas I have been working on for RedRag," he wrote to Labour blogger Derek Draper. "For ease, I've written all the below as I'd write them for the site."

The email suggested a series of unfounded and puerile smears against senior Tories. Draper responded 20 minutes later: "Absolutely totally brilliant Damian. I'll think about timing and sort out the technology this week so we can go as soon as possible." …

McBride suggested spreading gossip, entirely unfounded, that [Conservative party leader David] Cameron may have suffered from a sexually transmitted disease. He wrote that Cameron should be challenged to publish his "full financial and medical records". He also suggested "inserting [a] picture of Dr Christian Jessen", who appears on the Channel 4 programme Embarrassing Bodies. There was no suggestion the two men knew each other.

For some reason this brings to mind the Gospel of John’s faintly-disparaging comments about Peter and Thomas, to say nothing of those about “the Jews.”

The about-face reaction to Scottish singer Susan Boyle exemplifies how we eventually learn to do better

I watched the YouTube clip of Susan Boyle.  She’s the frumpy, cheerful, middle-aged Scottish singer whose appearance on Britain’s Got Talent became a worldwide sensation. What interested me most was the sense of mild shame shown by the judges and the audience for having made a derisive snap judgment about Boyle, based solely on her appearance and demeanor. As one commentator said:

Part of the joy of watching her performance was seeing the obnoxious, smarmy grimaces disappear from the faces of Simon Cowell and Piers Morgan, two of the show’s judges, and seeing the audience shift, in an instant, from tittering condescension to open-mouthed admiration.

Amanda Holden, the third judge, said apologetically to Boyle that her performance had been "the biggest wakeup call ever.”

That’s one of the things that gives me such great hope for humanity: Not that we can be thoughtless and mean and even vicious to each other, but that we can recognize, eventually — and often after inflicting horrendous damage — that we need to change our hearts and minds and the way we conduct our lives.

Some claim that this capacity to learn is innate to our nature; others insist it’s the result of undeserved divine grace.  One thing’s for sure: We don’t have enough real data (as opposed to speculation) to enable us to argue the question intelligently.

So for now, we should simply be grateful we have the capacity, and seek out opportunities to exercise it.