Attack of the Lynx! [Part VI]

Some of these are a little older than others, but all caught my interest at some point so you will be interested too :)

• Baby dies because parents are too busy playing video games.
• 6-year-old becomes youngest girl in Oregon history to commit suicide
• Woman sues Canadian company for sending her phone bill...which reveals her secret affair.
• Was the 20th Century the Playboy Century (How Hugh Hefner Changed America)?
• Perhaps related, the lefty Daily Beast gives you 15 ways to predict divorce.
• Trenchant analysis from The Atlantic: What happens when the so-called "Best and Brightest" fail?
• And what does it say about our country when 20 percent of American atheists profess a belief in God?? (Or our polling, as the case may be.)
• And on two lighter notes to end, check out where ND ranks on the most expensive season tickets in college football.
• And how do you see colors? :)

Google is treating me badly so I'm not sure if this got published or not...Apologies if I bore you with my repetition.

Book: “God’s Continent,” Philip Jenkins

• “Though ancient churches stand as visible monuments, defining the landscape of cities and villages, most have lost their traditional role as thriving centers of community. At least in its institutional form, and that is an important distinction, European Christianity seems to be terminally ill.”
• “In some Muslim nations, around 90 percent declare that religion “plays a very important role” in their lives, while the U.S. figure in 2002 was about 60 percent. The average figure for Europeans was 21 percent, though of course with national variations…Between 1973 and 1994, the proportion of French people claiming no religion grew from 11 percent to 34 percent.”
• “German sociologist Ulrich Beck notes…’there is a rough rule of thumb according to which the closer one gets to the Pope, the fewer children one has.’”
• “The clearest example of institutional implosion is Ireland, which as recently the 1970s enjoyed the highest level of religious practice in Europe: 85 percent to 90 percent of Catholics regularly attended Sunday mass.”
• John Bruton, former Irish PM, calls the attitude towards religion in the EU “a form of secular intolerance in Europe that is every bit as strong as religious intolerance of the past.”
• “The steady march of gay marriage laws suggests a near collapse of the political power of the churches, though such changes have not occurred without fervent efforts at resistance. In Ireland as recently as 1995, a referendum on the question of legalizing divorce still showed 49.72 percent opposed to even this reform.”
• “While few advocate prohibition, many secular commentators agree that drink culture in Britain has become uncontrollable and dangerous, a serious incentive to violence and sexual assault, and that much greater restraint is needed. Yet the Anglican church has not spoken powerfully on the issue, largely because it does not want to be seen interfering in personal morality. Historically, such reticence is very new, and it could well fade if and when Christians and Muslims do make common cause.”
• “Death and resurrection are not just fundamental doctrines of Christianity; they represent a historical model of the religion’s structure and development.”

Threats

Three little things to brighten your Sunday:

The "war on terrorism"/"war on terrorists" - "Remember, the bad guys are totally committed — and they are not tired." Worth reading if only this is Tom Freidman writing, not Bill O'Reilly.

The Aging of America - This chart updates every couple seconds showing the distribution by age over time of our nation's population. And yet we shouldn't worry about the solvency of social security.

"Moralistic Therapeutic Deism" - "Basically, God exists and watches over human life, which was created by God. God wants people to be nice, as it says in the bible and in most world religions. God does not have to be involved in our lives except to solve our problems and make us happy. Good people will be even happier in heaven after they die. The religious beliefs of American teens tend to be -- as a whole, across all traditions -- that simple. It’s something Jews and Catholics and Protestants of all stripes seem to have in common. It is instrumentalist. "This God is not demanding," say the authors. "He actually can’t be, because his job is to solve our problems and make people feel good." (from "The Revealer".)

36 hours to Chicago

A last Seattlian flurry of links as I try to clean house before leaving back to school.

Gallup recently released a "State of the States" poll tracking religious identities in the different states. The two graphs I found most interesting:




Dori Monson, a local talk show host of whom I can't say I'm a huge fan, put together a pretty concise take-down of Obama's PR push on HC. He has video and quotes and the whole nine yards, but I liked this contradiction he found: "In fact, in 2003, Obama laid out his plan in a speech to the AFL-CIO: "Single payer health care plan. Universal health care plan. That's what I'd like to see. But as all of you know, we may not get there immediately. Because first we have to take back the White House, we have to talk back the Senate and we have to take back the country"...Obama in 2009: "I have not said that I was a single-payer supporter." And don't get me started on the USPS analogy.

But on the flip side, leave it to David Frum to point out some of the truly scary aspects of opponents of the current health care reform bill: "If Barack Obama really were a fascist, really were a Nazi, really did plan death panels to kill the old and infirm, really did contemplate overthrowing the American constitutional republic—if he were those things, somebody should shoot him. But he is not. He is an ambitious, liberal president who is spending too much money and emitting too much debt. His health-care ideas are too ambitious and his climate plans are too interventionist. The president can be met and bested on the field of reason—but only by people who are themselves reasonable."

And that's enough for now.

Attack of the Lynx! [Part V]

The Economist has a cleverly-written while fairly pedestrian look at the first half-year of the Obama administration. Some choice quotes:

• "An impression is being formed in Washington of a presidency that is far too ready to hand over the direction of domestic policy to Congress; that is drifting either deliberately or lethargically leftwards; and that is more comfortable with lofty visions than details."
• "He has been curiously ill-served by a press short of useful criticism, with liberal America prepared only to debate what sort of water he walks on best, while conservative radio hosts argue over when exactly he became a communist."
• "What should Mr Obama do? He must come down from his cloud and start leading. The House Democrats could be usefully reminded that their present 78-seat margin owes everything to the president’s coat-tails; they are endangering his popularity."

Your faithful Heritage automaton brings you this public service announcement: "One Pill, Two Pill, Red Pill, Blue Pill: Top 10 Reasons Obamacare Is Wrong for America." But seriously, please do read it, even if you disagree with all 10, I think it's really important. It is 1/6 of the American economy, after all, and we all come into contact with it at some point.

In related news, from Rasmussen via Sullivan:


Enough politics.

I found this article from October 2008 in the NYT that raises some interesting questions about both infidelity and social science research: "Infidelity appears to be on the rise, particularly among older men and young couples. Notably, women appear to be closing the adultery gap: younger women appear to be cheating on their spouses nearly as often as men...data show that in any given year, about 10 percent of married people — 12 percent of men and 7 percent of women — say they have had sex outside their marriage."

I've always been a little skeptical of the mega-church crowd (Osteen, Warren, et al) and this Slate piece by Clint Rainey raises some interesting points - "God wants to give you your own home." Sorry, I missed that in my Bible. ("It's not my job to try to straighten everybody out," Osteen famously told Larry King in 2005, adding, "My message is a message of hope.")

St. Paul was awesome and this is kind of even more awesome. "Benedict said archaeologists recently unearthed and opened the white marble sarcophagus located under the Basilica of St. Paul's Outside the Walls in Rome, which for some 2,000 years has been believed by the faithful to be the tomb of St. Paul."

"The girls—all white and middle class—started budding breasts a full year earlier than their counterparts just 15 years ago (the age of menstruation had advanced about four months). While that’s a stunner in itself, the real head-scratcher was that the change in girls’ body weight was minimal and couldn’t account for the difference. Nearly all the girls in both groups were relatively thin...So if fat isn’t resetting the puberty clock, what is?" Two theories are divorce and the media, according to the Double X blog.

Religion and College

"[O]ur results suggest that postmodernism, rather than science, is the bête noir -- the strongest antagonist -- of religiosity." A UMichigan study looks at the religious habits of college students:

• Being a humanities or a social science major has a statistically significant negative effect on religiosity -- measured by either religious attendance and how important students consider the importance of religion in their lives. The impact appears to be strongest in the social sciences.
• Students in education and business show an increase in religiosity over their time at college.

I wonder if they studied ND...

Hello world

This is mainly to be used as a repository for my own benefit to store links, articles, facts, trains of thought, and whatever philosophical, societal, cultural, or political tirades I feel the need to express at the time. 

For example, this article by Nicholas Kristof of the NYT, published a couple days before Christmas, comes to the same conclusion from a Progressive standpoint that I could have intuited for years: Namely, that liberals are ready to talk a big game about government taking your money away to fund charity and social programs precisely because they are so loathe to give up any of their own wealth voluntarily. "Bleeding Heart Tightwads."

Also, I have consistently regarded Dinesh D'Souza as one of my personal favorite writers to pay attention to, and this 2006 article from the San Francisco Chronicle is a pretty good introduction to one of his major themes. "God Knows Why Faith Is Thriving." 

I saw "It's a Wonderful Life" today for the first time, and really liked it, particularly the note at the end: "Remember, no man is a failure who has friends."

Also, while listening to the homily in Mass, I liked my tangent of thinking of God as a limit concept, and offered the poor analogy of a light being refracted in infinitesimally many ways through the manifestations of grace. More work to be done here.

Enjoy future posts, everyone, and Merry Christmas.