The Questioning Christian: We're helping with the Great Project

Solar cells on cell-phone towers in developing nations may help save lives by powering vaccine refrigerators

See 'Off-grid' cellphone towers could save lives, by Harvey Rubin and Alice Conant.

Networking lessons from the Gospel of Luke

(Adapted from a comment I made to someone else's posting at Hacker News:) When I've been at business events where I don't know anyone, I don't even bother trying to introduce myself to the "important" folks. (Cf. Luke 14.7-11.) I seem to have enjoyed such events the most when I've looked around for people in the same boat as I; introduced myself; and asked them about themselves. I'll interject bits of my own story when appropriate, but I try to keep the conversation focused mostly on the other person. After a few minutes, I'll smile and say, "hey, it's been great talking to you," maybe swap business cards, and move on - rinse, repeat. 

If I can play matchmaker and help get multiple new acquaintances talking to each other, so much the better.

Some open-ended questions I've found useful: How did you end up at X company? What got you into X field? What challenges do you see ahead for X field?

I figure life isn't a snapshot, it's a movie; if I keep going to these events, and keep focusing on making others feel welcome and included (even if only by me), then in due course I'll end up getting to know the movers and shakers.

Oops ...

Dear readers who get notified of new posts by email:  In my post on the GOP Pledge to America, I clicked "Publish" too soon (I meant to click "Preview").  Please read the complete post.

The GOP Pledge to America: Abolishing "traffic laws"?

Give the GOP credit:  In offering the 2010 version of their 1994 Contract with America, dubbed the "Pledge to America," at least they're being clear about what they'd do if they regained control of Congress.  (I found a draft of the Pledge at Scribd and am working through its 21 pages.)   Some of the GOP proposals make sense; others, I'm not at all so sure about. 

The Pledge talks about cutting through job-killing government red tape. But if there's one thing we know about people of all stripes, it's that they can focus single-mindedly on the pursuit of what they want; they'd much prefer not to have to think about the possible side effects of their actions. (Economists call these side effects externalities.) That goes for two-year-olds, for tycoons, and for everyone in between.

Rodney Clapp put it well a couple of years ago in The Christian Century: "The theological rationale for the necessity (and the potential nobility) of government can be summarized in two words: original sin. Each and every person and institution is prone to self-deception and destructive self-interest. ... There is no such thing as sufficient self-regulation on Wall Street, on Main Street, in our churches or anywhere else. ..." (Emphasis added.)

It'd be wonderful if we didn't need traffic laws, and every driver could relentlessly put the pedal to the metal to get to her destination, oblivious to everything around her. But that would have been a bad idea even in the days of Model Ts and two-lane gravel roads; it'd be disastrous in this day of SUVs and high-speed interstate freeways (not to mention giant tractor-trailer truck rigs).

The "road" we share is both more crowded and more complex. It seems pretty silly to insist that the simple "traffic laws" of yesteryear are all we need.

Related posts:

• Sin as Evolutionary Side Effect
• Financial regulations can be like fire safety rules

Can disbelief be reconciled with worship?

Last week a reader sent me a Facebook message expressing hope that I hadn't discontinued this blog, saying, "Goyim for God, indeed!" I take the liberty of quoting from [his or her] reply to my response:

... I'm a lifelong [denomination member] recently transplanted to a small [location] town where my only church option is St. [XX] Episcopal ....

But talk about culture shock! Worship is a constant barrage of words that I either don't believe or that offend me (it will take some time), and I'm struggling with Book of Common Prayer on the one hand and the apparent absence of any normative common wisdom on the other. I say the first line of the Nicene Creed and am then silent. [Me too - DCT.] ... Yet the people are dear, the rector--rather conservative theologically--is masterful at pastoring, and I am chipping away at a niche for myself. Still longing for the Goyim for God!

... I am deeply concerned about the future of Christianity if all the laity sees is fundamentalism, megachurch me-ism, or 4th century theology. Where is panentheism in the pulpits? Where is there talk of process--or of anything other than Jesus as the biological son of God? We're doing a decent job of whaling away at social issues, but what about theology? What can a layperson do (other than write a highly articulate blog)? I gather you have found a way to be comfortable with worship. How do you do that?

Truth to tell, I've grown increasingly uncomfortable with traditional Christian corporate worship. Except when I have blood-drive duty every eight weeks, I haven't been to church at our parish in over a year.  (My ever-supportive wife and I visited a couple of other nearby parishes, but she decided she didn't want to switch, for reasons I completely understand. So now she goes alone, and I'm not sufficiently motivated to become a regular at another parish on my own.)

Why have I stopped going to church? Because over the past 10 years or so, our parish has become far too Jesus-centered for comfort. As junior clergy have moved on, they've been replaced by evangelicals; all of our parish's recent calls have been products of Nashotah House or Trinity School for Ministry, two bastions of orthodox ideology. The sermons, the hymns, the Sunday school lessons all seemed to focus mainly on Jesus as (supposedly) God become man, who defeated once and for all the sin of the world and who would soon return in triumph — all of which are notions that, in my humble judgment, simply cannot be reconciled with the evidence of what God actually wrought in this world, as opposed to what some people imagine he did.

I remain convinced that belief in a Creator of some kind is eminently defensible, and that the Summary of the Law — paraphrased slightly — is the key to a happy life.  I admire and respect Jesus for his commitment to both, even at the cost of his life. I still love and respect my friends at our parish, many of whom have said they miss me on Sundays. I can't rule out that it's I, not they, who is totally missing the point (but I don't think that's the case). 

Still, I squirm when preachers and laity act as though there's no room in the church for any point of view that doesn't square with what I can only judge to be sheer speculation. In the end, that's what caused me to stay away from church, at least at our parish.

I've toyed with the idea of asking some of my like-minded parishioner friends if they'd be interested in starting a Goyim for God study group that meets somewhere for Morning- or Evening Prayer (minus the Gloria Patri and the Phos Hilaron) and Sunday brunch or dinner, either in lieu of or in addition to the Sunday service at church. Maybe someday we can give that a shot and see how it might work.

World-renowned computer programmer Linus Torvalds becomes U.S. citizen - why it matters

See the oh-by-the-way comment in this posting by the world-renowned Finnish computer programmer Linus Torvalds, mentioning that he became a U.S. citizen last week (hat tip: Hacker News).

It's been said before: It seems that "foreigners" want to become Americans far more than the other way around, which suggests that as a nation we must not be doing that badly.

XKCD on atheists

Big government is a necessary counterweight to big business, says The Christian Century

A mantra I've stressed in this blog is that the First Commandment calls us to face the facts, to live in the real world wrought by the Creator and not in some fantasy land of our own making.

One of the facts that must be faced is that people just don't always do what they're "supposed" to do. Perhaps as a side effect of natural selection, we can be relentlessly single-minded in our pursuit of what we want, to the point of inflicting harm on ourselves and others. This relentlessness can be seen in all areas of life, not least in some of the upper reaches of the business world.

Apropos of that, recently The Christian Century's editors nicely summed up why my politics have become a bit more liberal and a bit less laissez-faire than they used to be:

The Tea Party movement represents an effort to undo the 20th-century consensus of corporate liberalism, according to which Big Government is the necessary counterweight to Big Business, an arrangement that has offered a modicum of protection to the public while maintaining a stable political and economic environment for business.

Individual resistance to Big Anything is understandable. But in directing their libertarian passions at government alone, Tea Party activists fail to grasp the complexities and scale of modern life.

None of the major political challenges of our time—health care, environmental dangers, social security, the globalization of the economy and the immense power of banks and companies that become "too big to fail"—is addressed by the Tea Party's antitax, antigovernment ideology.

Tea Party's strange brew, The Christian Century, July 13, 2010, p. 7 (emphasis and extra paraagraphing added).

Mozart effect turns out to have been an urban-legend distortion of the original science

From the Distortions Desk:  NPR explains this morning that the so-called Mozart effect is actually an urban legend, a distortion of the much-more-limited research results reported by a scientist in 1993.

“… people are rather cavalier about the facts”

Over the years various posts in the "Distortions" category of this blog have linked to the famous Snopes.com Web site, which specializes in checking out urban legends and the like. This past Sunday the NY Times profiled the site and its founders, a married couple, who now make a living from the site's ad­ver­tis­ing revenues.

(It's ironic that the Times published the piece on Easter Sunday, which commemorates an event that, as longtime readers know, I strongly suspect was just such an urban legend, a story mutation arising from Jesus' disciples' efforts to make sense of the catastrophic events they'd just witnessed, and the fact that his body was no longer where it had been put on Friday night, and the fact that some of his followers concluded that they had seen him alive.)

Here's an excerpt:

The popularity of Snopes — it attracts seven million to eight million unique visitors in an average month — puts the couple in a unique position to evaluate digital society’s attitudes toward accuracy.

After 14 years, they seem to have concluded that people are rather cavalier about the facts.

* * *

“People keep falling for the same kind of things over and over again,” Mr. Mikkelson said. Some readers always seem to think, for instance, that the government is trying to poison them: Mrs. Mikkelson said rumors about AIDS have been recycled into rumors about swine flu vaccines.

For the Mikkelsons, the site affirms what cultural critics have bemoaned for years: the rejection of nuance and facts that run contrary to one’s point of view.

“Especially in politics, most everything has infinite shades of gray to it, but people just want things to be true or false,” Mr. Mikkelson said. “In the larger sense, it’s people wanting confirmation of their world view.”

(Emphasis added.)

Read the rest.