http://blogcritics.org/ A sinister cabal of superior bloggers on music, books, film, popular culture, politics, and technology - updated continuously. en Copyright 2005-2007 by the authors Sun, 8 May 2005 21:20:05 EDT http://backend.userland.com/rss Blogcritics.org custom software http://blogcritics.org/ Phillip WinnSunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding. Administration0@blogcritics.org Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/05/08/212005.php Rick HellerNeuroscientist Benjamin Libet has done pioneering experiments which provide the best evidence available with regard to the question of free will. He's one of the first scientists to study the subjective experiences of conscious awareness and correlate them with activity in the brain. In his best known experiment, he showed that before a voluntary action let's say a person decides to flick their wrist&#8212there are telltale signs in the brain of their action 1/2 second before the person realizes they've even made a decision. Libet seems to have proven that the conscious will does not in fact initiate action. Libet has shown, however, that there is a "conscious veto" or what some call "free won't" by which our mind can inhibit action proposed by our subconscious. There is a short window of around 1/10 of a second after an idea becomes conscious in which a person can squelch it. Otherwise, it procedes.Libet has shown that, in general, it takes about 1/2 second for information in our environment to become conscious. The half-second seems to be required to get a critical mass or neurons to work in synch on a single problem. We can react quicker than that&#8212athletes do that frequently&#8212but these reactions are pre-programmed and occur without conscious awareness. Baseball players, for instance, are not consciously aware of the arc of a pitch. They swing on instinct developed through practice. Also, when we speak, we generally are not aware of the words we are about to say, but rather have the gist in mind, and allow our unconscious to come up with the words. Libet started out as a materialist, but after many years in the lab, he's concluded that what's known of the physical world cannot account for consciousness. The notion that the mind is reducible to the brain is, in his view, an unproven hypothesis. Libet also argues that it is meaningful to speak of the "unconscious mind." Many who argue that consciousness is not reducible to the brain would nevertheless accept that the unconscious is reducible to the brain. Libet, however, seems to regard some of the unconscious as pre-conscious, just outside peripheral vision, needing only attention to make it conscious. I remain skeptical as to whether "unconscious mind" is useful terminology.Libet raises the interesting question as to why specific parts of the cortex give rise to sense perceptions of a specific quality--i.e. what is special about the organization of the neurons in the visual cortex that it gives rise to visual sensation, as compared to the neurons in the auditory cortex. According to Libet, there is a growing consensus that the mind does not arise from a few specialized neurons, but is a global process that involves large numbers of neurons working simultaneously. This fits in to McFadden's cemi theory, though Libet does not refer to it. Without embracing it, Libet raises the idea that a non-physical mind cold affect the physical brain. There are three possibilities to account for conscious veto. First, there could be true free will, with a immaterial conscious mind affecting the future state of the brain. Second, the veto could be essentially random, and give the illusion of free will without truly being chosen. Third, there could be prior antecedents in the brain which give rise to the conscious veto, though Libet has not found any. Free will is of course an issue in moral philosophy and criminal justice. If the choices people make are predetermined, or determined at random, some defendant is sure to plead innocent because "my neurons made me do it" But even if people are not innocent or guilty in terms of having freely chosen to commit crime, it would still be reasonable to take such criminals out of circulation until they are no longer dangerous. Books29196@blogcritics.org Sun, 8 May 2005 21:20:05 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/05/02/204755.php Rick HellerThis book contains two startling ideas: the first, a radical hypothesis about evolution, challenges both NeoDarwinism and Intelligent Design; the second is a novel theory about consciousness. Of the two, I remain unsold on his hypothesis about evolution, but I'm hooked on his theory of consciousness.McFadden is a professor of molecuar genetics in the UK. His professional background is substantial, and he is a leader in an effort to develop a vaccine for meningitis. He also writes occasionally in The Guardian, which is not necessarily an impressive qualification given some of the far-out pieces published by that prestigious newspaper, but this piece of his on genetically modified organisms shows a lot of common sense.Excerpts from the book are here. A quick summary of his ideas on quantum biology can be found in one of his Guardian pieces. He argues that DNA is subject to the effects of quantum mechanics. The form and dynamics of every living organism on this planet is controlled by a single molecule of DNA. Recent experiments suggest that size alone is not a bar to quantum behaviour. A group based in Vienna have recently fired fullerene molecules through the double slit experiment and demonstrated that these particles have no problem in sailing through both slits simultaneously. And fullerene is big - 60 carbon atoms in a cage-like structure, the famous "buckyball" molecule - with a diameter similar to that of the DNA double helix. If fullerene can enter the quantum multiverse then the microscopic constituents of our own cells, including DNA, are in there as well. He notes that a common source of genetic mutations is the the result of tautomers, a change in one of the hydrogen bonds of a DNA base, as a result of quantum effects, which allows a DNA base to bond with another base with which it is not usually paired. These occur in roughly .01% of DNA pairs, and if not detected by the cells DNA proofreading mechanisms, lead to transcription errors and mutation. McFadden then refers to the work of Harvard researcher John Cairns, which suggests that mutations may not be strictly random, but may in some cases occur more frequently when a cell is stressed, and needs to mutate in order to survive. Cairns experiments have been reproduced, but there is still some debate about their interpretation. It does provide a possible mechanism for increasing the frequency of mutations that are adaptive rather than destructive.McFadden agrees with some critics of neodarwinism (i.e. Darwin's hypothesis of natural selection fortified by what we know from molecular biology) that random mutations don't provide a good mechanism to account for major leaps in evolution. However, he rejects the hypothesis of leading intelligent design theorist Michael Behe that a Godlike designer is required to account for macroevolution. Instead, McFadden suggests that quantum mechanics might provide a mechanism to produce low probability mutations. Indeed, he argues that it might provide a mechanism where, if a single mutation would not be adaptive, there could be multiple mutations at once to get quickly to a more complex system. Relying on the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, McFadden suggests that even if the origin of life required an ultra-low-probability event, far less than one-trillion to one, it might still happen, plucked out of all the possibilities by its own bootstraps, because life can make quantum scenarios real. His theory seems to involve a form of precognition, or action of the future onto the present. In the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, the entire history of a branch of the universe exists as a block comprising past, present, and future. In some possible branches of the future, near-simultaneous random mutations might help an organism get over the hump of irreducible complexity to the next stable complex state.But what would make that low-probability event--something McFadden does not call a "miracle" but sounds like one--into an actuality? McFadden invokes an inverse quantum Zeno effect as a way of leading the universe to this low-probability outcome. A series of observations of quantum systems provide a trail of bread crumbs, to the adaptive outcome. But what is doing the series of leading observations? McFadden suggests it may be the organism in its future state. McFadden's quantum evolution hypothesis is clever and creative, but I don't buy it, just yet. If there is an observer, perhaps that observer is outside the system, like Bishop Berkeley's God. McFadden refuses to invoke God, but he is perhaps providing the Intelligent Design movement with the best mechanism for the actions of their intelligent designer.On the other hand, I've got cash in hand and itching to purchase McFadden's electromagnetic theory of consciousness. This is tacked on as the book's final chapter, but alone makes the book worth reading. McFadden proposes that an electromagnetic theory of consciousness. This consciousness electromagnetic information field (cemi field) theory may sound far-fetched, but it rests on just three propositions. The first is that the brain generates its own em field, a fact that is well known and utilised in brain scanning techniques such as EEG. The second is that the brain's em field is indeed the seat of consciousness. This is far harder to prove but there is plenty of evidence that is at least consistent with this hypothesis. Em fields are waves that tend to cancel out when the peaks and troughs from many unsynchronised waves combine. But if neurones fire together, then the peaks and troughs of their em fields will reinforce each other to generate a large disturbance to the overall em field. In recent years neuroscientists in many laboratories across the world have become interested in the phenomenon of neuronal synchrony. Experiments from Paris' Laboratoire de Neurosciences demonstrated synchronous firing in distinct regions of the brain when a subject's attention is aroused by a pattern that resembled a face. When the subject saw only lines then his neurones fired randomly but when the subject realised he was looking at a face, his neurones snapped into step to fire synchronously. In this, and in many similar experiments, neurone firing alone does not correlate with awareness - but the em field disturbance generated by synchronous firing, does. The simplest explanation is that the brain's em field is conscious awareness - the cemi field. The last cemi field proposition is that the brain's (conscious) em field can itself influence neuronal firing. Like the first proposition, this is easy to prove and is indeed inevitable. Radio sets and TV's are designed to be sensitive to the electromagnetic fields of radio waves; but in fact all electrical phenomena are sensitive to the surrounding em field. Neurones are fired by specific structures, known as voltage-gated ion channels that respond to the external em field. Mostly they are gated in such a way that only massive changes to the brain's em field are likely to influence neurone firing. However, in a busy brain there will be many neurones teetering on the brink of firing and these undecided neurones may be exquisitely sensitive to the em field. The cemi field - our consciousness - will come into play when the brain is poised to make delicate decisions. What strikes me is the theories resemblance to my own speculation in this blog that consciousness has wavelike properties, which I first presented in a science fiction story published in 2001 (I'd never heard of the cemi theory until a few weeks ago--at least not conciously--but nothing makes an idea seem like genius than its resemblance to our own thoughts!) Similar to my own speculations, McFadden proposes that simple electromagnetic fields, like those in a TV set, would not attain consciousness; only deeply convoluted fields such as are produced by the brain, and which potentially could be produced in a future computer, are conscious.Having been trained as an electrical engineer, I can tell you that McFadden is right that electrical currents produce magnetic fields. That's Ampere's Law. Fluctuating magnetic fields induce electrical current. That's Faraday's Law. Given that the flow of electrical impulses through the neurons is always changing, the magnetic field produces is guaranteed to change, and likely to induce electrical flows. The brain clearly produces an electromagnetic field, and the field clearly could affect neuronal circuits. The only question is, does that make a difference? Most likely so. Dr. Michael Persinger claims to have successfully used magnetic stimulation in the laboratory to induce thoughts and feelings.There are several other elements that make me well disposed toward the cemi theory. McFadden argues that it provides a neat solution to the binding problem, which is the question of how the actions in the various neurons come together to produce a unified experience in the conscious observer. A mind field provides a neat way of integrating the diverse affects of neurons, because fields are additive within the same space, unlike matter, which having defined dimensions, prevents other matter from existing within the same space. Surprisingly, McFadden does not mention holography. Neuroscientists like Karl Pribram have hypothesized that the mind operates along holographic principles. The interference patterns produced by the electromagnetic fields of the brain's circuits could provide a physical basis for bioholography.McFadden's argument regarding consciousness, up to this point, does not require any involvement of quantum mechanics. But it is certainly compatible with quantum mechanical theories of consciousness. Indeed, I find it more plausible that consciousness could interact with an electromagnetic field as a whole, rather than being directly entangled with elements of matter in the brain, such as microtubules or calcium ions. This sort of holistic operation would also help elucidate the many-to-one relationship between neurons and the mind, in which massive amounts of data flow from brain to mind in an apparently parallel stream, while a trickle of data, consisting of the choices made by the mind, flow back to the brain in an apparently serial stream. McFadden does not reduce consciousness to electromagnetism. There would still be a domain where the qualities of conscious existence are expressed, but electromagnetic energy would provide the bridge between mind and matter.McFadden's electromagnetic theory of consciousness may seem far out to some readers. It may well be wrong. But there is one thing I'm certain of: the eventual true explanation of consciousnessness will be astonishing and strange, for if it fit easily with existing knowledge, the mystery would have been solved years ago.Note: In a response(pdf) to a review of the McFadden book by Matthew Donald(pdf), McFadden and his collaborator, Jim Al-Khalili, reference the work of the physicist, Eric Heller, who is also known as Rick Heller. I am a different Rick Heller(the two of us are in a constant battle on Google, along with some guy who sells flutes shaped like a duck, to be the Rick Heller ;-: ). Books28959@blogcritics.org Mon, 2 May 2005 20:47:55 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/04/03/115057.php Rick HellerI'd never heard of Jeffrey Schwartz until Ambivablog recommended him. I've since read his book, The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force, and I'm astounded. He's saying in print a radical idea I've long espoused, but been unable to get anyone to take seriously--that the mind can affect the brain.Is that really radical? Common sense tells us that our minds make a difference. We decide to snap our fingers, and it happens. But for many scientists, saying that mind can affect matter smacks of parapsychology. They would say that our neural circuits caused us to snap our fingers, and our mind merely observed the decision. At best, some who hold this view are willing to accept the mind as an epiphenomenon, a byproduct of the brain, or as William James put it, like a shadow which accompanies the body but has no influence over it. For some reason, the notion that matter affects mind doesn't seem as pseudoscientific as its opposite. An example of this orthodoxy can be found in Wider Than The Sky: The Phenomenal Gift Of Consciousness, by brain scientist Gerald Edelman, a winner of the Nobel Prize. Schwartz, a UCLA psychiatrist, who wrote the book along with Wall Street Journal science writer Sharon Begley, argues that influence can go in the direction of mind to brain. His professional expertise is in treating obsessive-compulsive disorder(OCD). He has pioneered a therapy for OCD patients which teaches them to reframe their thoughts. Schwartz discusses the concept of neuroplasticity, the ability of the brain to rewire itself as a result of thinking. He presents evidence of PET scans which demonstrate changes in brain function following cognitive behavior therapy, a form of talk therapy that does not involve drugs. Schwartz does not provide iron-clad proof of the mind's ability to rewire the brain, but makes a good preliminary case. A hardcore materialist would argue that talk therapy itself is a purely material phenomenon, whereby the human voice produces sound waves which excite the auditory cortex of the listener, which arouses neural circuits throughout the brain. But this reductionist view doesn't adequately explain why conscious attention seems to help these changes occur, while subliminal suggestions seem to have much less power. Schwartz also discusses the experiments of Benjamin Libet, who has shown that before people notice having decided to make a voluntary movement, preparation for the movement can be observed in the brain, though the actual movement occurs after the feeling of having decided. Some scientists, like Richard Restak, have used these results to argue that free will is an illusion, and that the feeling of having decided follows a decision made in the neurons. However, Libet himself believes that there is time in the sequence for the conscious mind to veto the otherwise automatic movement. Instead of free will, there is free won't. Our unconscious presents an agenda, and brings it to the attention of consciousness. The chief role of the mind is to inhibit wrong action.Besides a detailed discussion of neuroscience, Schwartz makes several interesting philosophical arguments. First is an argument from evolution. If, as Edelman and others suggest, the conscious mind cannot affect the brain, how can it contribute to our survival? If it has no survival value, why would it have evolved? Schwartz rejects the notion that consciousness could be a spandrel, a term advanced by Gould and Lewontin to describe accidental byproducts of evolution that were not specifically selected for by evolutionary pressure. There's no way to determine who is right as yet, but to explain the most astonishing aspect of human existence--that we are conscious of our existence--as an accidental byproduct of evolution does indeed seem weak.Second, Schwartz argues from quantum physics, relying on the assistance of a colleague, physicist Henry Stapp. According to the predominant interpretations of subatomic physics, the universe at its tiniest grain is not solid, but fuzzy, and comes into focus only when observed. Most physicists, not being psychologists, are content to leave unexplained how a brain actually observes anything. However, Schwartz paraphrases physicist Eugene Wigner asking, "If the position of atoms (and thus, for our purposes, the state and arrangement of neurons, since neurons are only collections of zillions of atoms) have no unambiguous existence independent of the consciousness of an observer, then how can that very consciousness depend on those same atoms?" Schwartz, following Stapp, suggests that "mental force" in a way not yet understood, allows the mind to bias what happens in the brain. That is, at the point where a decision is to be made, the brain is delicately balanced between two cascades, one which would have the action go forward, and one which would inhibit it. Even if the effect of the mind is very tiny, if the brain were in such a delicately balanced state (imagine a nickel balanced on its edge) it could push it in one of two ways. Diehard materialists scoff at this notion, arguing that mixing quantum mechanics and consciousness is an attempt to conflate two separate mysteries. I am very much on Schwartz's side, because the most profound event of my life involved the application of mental force, as Schwartz would call it. I suffered from chronic eye pain over a period of eight years, which grew to the point where I could no longer do my job. I saw a parade of eye doctors, until an ophthalmologist at UCSF (the same institution where Libet did his research) suggested that the volume of pain I experienced was the result of my heightened attention to minor signs of irritation. At that moment, I heard an inner voice--the voice of my mother, yelling at me, "Stop reading! You'll ruin your eyesight. You'll go blind by the time you're thirty." She used to say this frequently, and planted in my mind the notion that I could "ruin my eyes." Following this epiphany, I realized that my chronic pain was psychosomatic. After building for 8 years, it faded away permanently in 48 hours, once I had reframed my thoughts. Somehow, my mind had influence over the volume of pain I experienced.There is an established theory which explains my experience. The gate control theory of pain holds that the nervous system contains "gates" which control the level of signal allowed to pass from pain receptors to the central nervous system. The more attention paid to pain signals, the wider open are the gates. It's easy to see in evolutionary terms why it makes sense to allow the body to turn up the volume of pain signals from wounded areas. In my case, the power of suggestion caused me to turn up the volume on everyday irritation of eyes that were essentially healthy. My experience was not precisely that of Schwartz's OCD patients, but it was similar. It is too easy to dismiss experiences like these as "all in the mind." They are in the mind, but that does not mean they are imaginary. What runs through the mind flows into the body. Schwartz's natural philosophy leads him to conclusions in moral philosophy. The mechanistic notion is that people are little more than carbon-based robots who make decisions mechanically, or if one goes along with Edelman, with a certain randomness that allows for creatively. But people don't have moral responsibility for actions which are programmed or random. If people are fleshy robots, it's not their fault when they do wrong; they're merely the product of the society that raised them. This logic has often been used to excuse crimes committed by the poor and oppressed--though paradoxically, the crimes of oppressors are rarely excused in this manner. Schwartz concludes, quoting a Buddhist teaching, "All beings are owners of their karma. Whatever volitional actions they do, good or evil, of those they shall become the heir." Books27697@blogcritics.org Sun, 3 Apr 2005 11:50:57 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/03/23/112703.php Rick HellerWhen David Chappell set out to write a history of the Civil Rights movement, he did not intend to write a book about religion. But Chappell, an atheist, found to his surprise that many of the subjects he interviewed for the book expressed a religious faith that could be called "fundamentalist" and considered the end of segregation in the South in the 1960's to be a case of the miracles made manifest. While not converted himself to this faith, he nonetheless concludes that the religious faith of the African-American participants in the Civil Rights struggle was the glue without which their political struggle would have failed. Chappell starts by sketching out the position of white liberals, who from the time they first came to national power in the 1930's, counseled black leaders not to agitate for change in the South, fearing a backlash from poor whites who were part of the New Deal coaltion. Instead, white liberals hoped that economic progress and education would lead to the gradual reduction in discrimination. Meanwhile, black churches in the first half of the 20th century served as an "opiate" while provided solace rather than encouraging collective action.Chappell describes the upsurge of the Civil Rights movement in the 1950's as less a political movement than a religous revival with political implications. Bayard Rustin said of Martin Luther King, Jr., "I was always amazed at how it was possible to combine this intense, analytical philosophical mind with this more or less fundamental--wll, I don't like to use the word 'fundamentalist'--but this abiding faith. Ralph Abernathy reported "miraculous cures" at the first mass meeting of the Montgomery boycott. After receiving death threats over the phone, King doubted whether he could go on. He prayed, and, he later wrote, "At that moment I experienced the preseence of the Divine as I had never experienced Him before. It seemed as thought I could hear the quiet assurance of an inner voice saying" "Stand up for righteousnes, stand up for truth; and God will be at your side forever." While the black churches crusaded for civil rights, white churches were mostly neutral. This was better than might have been expected, considering their enthusiastic support for slavery and the Confederacy a century earlier, or their support for the Religious Right political agenda in the 1980's. Some, like Billy Graham, were quietly supportive of civil rights. King appeared onstage at one of Graham's crusades in 1957, studied Graham's methods, and traveled with Graham to a conference of Baptists in Brazil in 1960. King proved to be both militant and moderate. Chappell puts King's activism in the context of Reinhold Niebuhr's distinction between Gandhi's nonviolent militance and Tolstoy's non-resistence, writing "Gandhians understood their technique to be a form of practical politics by which they coerced their enemies to make concessions against their will. They understood that their technique only worked in special circumstances. Tolstoyans, by contrast, turned the other cheek without regard to practical results or political and economic particulars."While many white liberals in the 1950's felt that a push toward desegregation was unrealistic, King and other civil rights leaders were able to create a new reality based in part on a prophetic vision of liberation based on the Old Testament. Perhaps the miracle was that the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama lists the names of only 40 martyrs, less than died in any number of terrorist incidents which have occurred since. This is a tribute to the moral force of disciplined non-violence. As Chappell sees it, the white liberals who advocated gradualism were providing "realistic" advice based on the normal politics, while the Civil Rights movement succeeded based on an irrational faith that broke the normal rules. What is to be made of this lesson as a guide for future action? Someone who I've heard preach against the limits of realism is Michael Lerner of Tikkun Magazine. Lerner, a student of Abraham Joshua Heschel, who marched with King, clearly has this prophetic politics in mind. But what also comes to mind is the report by Ron Suskind that the Bush Administration has contempt for the "reality-based community." Now, supporters of the President reject this portrait, and claim his vision is idealistic yet realistic. The point remains: what criteria can one use to judge a path when even its followers admit it's not based on realistic calculation?As I see it, the first criteria in discerning whether a faith-based approach which defies conventional realistic thinking is a correct one is evaluation the goal itself. That is, if an irrational means can achieve a rational end, it might be worthwhile, but if the end itself is irrational, like Hitler's vision of a new Europe subject to a master race, it must be rejected. Lerner's neo-pacifist path and Bush's more militaristic approach both pass this test, for while their means widely differ, their desired end state of a free, peaceful, and democratic Middle East is quite similar. The second criteria, as I see it, is whether it is fail-safe. That is, there is no guarantee that a faith-based means toward an end will work. What if it fails? What would be the consequences? In the case of Dr. King, he risked and eventually lost his life, but his nonviolent approach limited the possible harm to his community even in the case of failure. How do Lerner and Bush's visions stack up against this criteria? Are they fail-safe? I do not believe that either pass this test. Lerner's approach to terrorism seems to me more Tolstoyan than Gandhian, in that America was attacked by faith-based radicals who might respond to weakness by hitting us harder. The use of military force as a tool to spread democracy may work, but any project which involves the taking of human life requires a high level of justification. Another question is whether the faith-based approach can only work in certain circumstances and for a limited duration. Perhaps people are not up to living faithfully for extended periods of time. A religious left is trying to revive King's old-time prophetic religion. I do not believe the time is ripe for their movement. The sins of racism and segregation were manifest after the crimes of Nazi racism was exposed in the death camps. In contrast, the moral arguments for and against war in our present day are at best muddled. Rather than appealing to the views of a majority of Americans (outside the South) as Dr. King did, the new Religious Left expresses views outside the mainstream. Many prophets are content to be voices in the wilderness, and that may be the fate of the new Religious Left. King, by contrast, was a rare prophet who achieved success in his own lifetime and in its aftermath. Books27154@blogcritics.org Wed, 23 Mar 2005 11:27:03 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/03/20/151415.php Rick HellerThis is an unusual book, combining memoir with theology. Both authors contribute their life stories, which for the most part do not intersect. The authors argue that the traditional Western Christian focus on Jesus' suffering on the cross has resulted in a too easy acceptance of suffering, and in particular, has encouraged women to remain in abusive relationships. Parker relates the story of Anola Reed, who was counseled by a a fellow Methodist minister, who tried to help her escape from an abusive relationship. Instead, Reed remained with her husband, considering it her religious duty to keep the family together. Eventually, her husband killed her. Parker then writes of a woman she herself counseled, named Lucia. She had been repeatedly beaten by her husband, and had years before been told by a priest, "If you love Jesus, accept the beatings and bear them gladly, as Jesus bore the cross." Parker told Lucia that she need not accept her husband's beatings. Lucia left her husband. Brock was born in Japan, of a Japanese mother and American GI father. She grew up in Kansas as a Christian, though she was aware of Buddhist relatives. When Brock's mother left for the United States with her husband, Brock's grandfather said to her, "In his country, people are Christians. Your family want you to know that, if you decide to become a Christian, it will be all right. We will still love you, and you will still be our daughter." Would that Judaism, Christianity and Islam had such a liberal attitude. I'm afraid, however, that the dominant position of the three Abrahamic religions in the world is in part based on their intolerance of out-conversion.Brock grew up with a Christianity that was dour and pious, until she became close to a family who put fun into fundamentalism. They never convinced her, however, of the literal truth of the Bible and creationism, and it being the 1960's, she opted for a version of Christianity which emphasized social justice. I can relate to this experience myself, as my own Orthodox Jewish background was mostly a serious of don'ts--"don't eat unkosher, don't ride on the Sabbath" until I met Hasidic Jews who combined a number of spiritual do's with the don'ts. They even convinced me of creationism for a while, before I broke away from them.Parker discusses controversial episodes in her ministry, such as the split when her church decided to publically welcome gays, and a quarter of the members resigned. Parker is extremely revealing about painful episodes. She writes of being sexually abuse as a child by a neighbor. She writes of aborting the only child she would have had under pressure from a husband who changed his mind about having children. He threatened to leave her if she kept the pregnancy. Not surprisingly, the marriage failed anyway. She went to Seattle's Lake Union at night to drown herself, but happened upon a club of amateur astronomers who had set up their telescopes at lakeside. She ended up viewing Jupiter and going home. Parker found a second husband, but their relationship, joyous at first, foundered when she moved to Berkeley to head the Starr King School for the Ministry, while her husband continued to be based in Seattle. Recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse came to the surface as her second marriage came to an end. When a relationship with a third man became rocky, Parker attempted suicide, cutting her wrist until she heard an inner voice say, "Stop." By the end of the her narrative, she has healed somewhat, but retains deep wounds. Brocks's later narrative has a happier thrust when she discovers loving relatives she never knew existed. They retained photos of her from before she left Japan. She writes, "I like to think God might be like this: a presence whom we have never seen--perhaps do not know exists--but who has loved us from the beginning." Her relationships with men, while not as disastrous as Parker's, have their ups and down, with the narrative ending on a down note. Amidst their personal stories, the authors discuss theological problems of suffering as presented in the Bible, especially in the stories of Jesus and Job. They compare to child abuse the doctrine that God required his son to suffer and die as a human sacrifice, and therefore reject it as a true portrayal of God. Brock, who is now a director of a new initiative called Faith Voices for the Common Good, and Parker come to what is perhaps a feminist version of liberation theology. They conclude that women should not patiently suffer at the hand of men in expectation of reward in heaven, but should take inspiration from the prophets who sought justice in this world. As a Jewish-American whose ancestors were persecuted for what they supposedly did to Jesus, I see the Christian focus on Jesus suffering and death as being at the heart of much of the suffering inflicted by Christians. Rather, it is the many positive aspects of Jesus life, his non-violence and concern for justice, which are worth of study and imitation. I note that the submission of women to violent men is not just an issue in Christianity; the Somali-Dutch feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali has been threatened with death as a result of her allegedly blasphemous charges that Islam condones violence against women, and even an Islamic service held in Manhattan came under threats of violence because it was led by a woman. Books27007@blogcritics.org Sun, 20 Mar 2005 15:14:15 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/03/09/155324.php Rick HellerMany of us claim dysfunctional mothers. I do. Reading about Julie Gregory's mother makes me thankful for what my mother did not do to me. Gregory suffered from a condition with the extravagant name of Munchausen by Proxy. Baron von Munchausen was a real life teller of tall tales, and is best known through the Terry Gilliam movie, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. In the Munchausen syndrome, people make themselves ill for perverse psychological reasons. In the "by proxy" variant, a person makes someone else ill. Julie Gregory's mother made her sick.Gregory grew up in a rural section of Ohio southeast of Columbus in the 1970's and 1980's. Her parents were in a mutually abusive relationship. There were many guns in the house, and her mother frequently threatened suicide. According to Gregory's account, her parents eventually set fire to the house for the insurance money. Much of what Gregory describes of her childhood fits in with stereotypes of Appalachian hillbilly life, though Gregory nevertheless finds fresh horrors to describe. What makes the memoir unusual is the series of medical procedures which Gregory was subjected to, including cardiac catheterization, to investigate "heart ailments" which Gregory's mother had detected in her child. Gregory's doctors were duped by an apparently concerned mother to write prescriptions and do procedures, refusing only her mother's request to perform exploratory open-heart surgery on Gregory! In all likelihood, Gregory's symptoms were the results of stress and the side effects of unnecessary medication.Gregory eventually ran away from her family and got Children's Services involved, though through a series of events, she was coerced back into the family before leaving for good. Gregory reports that, to her horror, her mother has taken in a set of foster children and may be abusing them. Her website reports correspondence with Child and Family Services in the state of Montana, where her mother now lives. According to the introduction by Dr Marc Feldman, Gregory's case is not unique, though it's the first account by a victim of Munchausen by Proxy. He reports a figure of 1,200 cases annually, with many more going unreported. Gregory's account rings true. My own mother projected medical fears onto me. Later, a disorder I suffered from turned out to be psychosomatic. At times, Gregory's writing suffers from irritating shifts in tense for no apparent reason. After the inspiring epiphany where Gregory leans about Munchausen by Proxy and diagnoses herself, there are several pages of cathartic writing which could have been trimmed. But overall, this is a gripping tale of a perverse form of child abuse which grows increasingly dramatic as one page turns to the next.In this era of "family values," it's important to remember that not all families are good families. Gregory might have been better off, for instance, had she been raised by a gay male couple chosen at random. That might be difficult in the state of Ohio, where in 2004, voters passed a referendum to ban gay marriage and civil unions, and where President Bush won with the help of an increased turnout from rural church-going people like Gregory's parents. Families at their best can be wonderful, but often they're oppressive. One of the joys of modern life is the possibility of living as an individual free of obligation to family, kin and tribe. Books26490@blogcritics.org Wed, 9 Mar 2005 15:53:24 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/02/24/160007.php Rick HellerJim Wallis has recently emerged as a leading voice for religious liberals, much in demand since the 2004 election, when the plurality of voters who cited "moral values" as their most important issue voted heavily Republican.Republicans pushed their version of moral values, more notably resistance to gay marriage, throughout the campaign, while John Kerry, mostly before church audiences, cited his moral vision, rooted in the Catholic emphasis on good works. Wallis claims the Democratic moral vision was clouded in the mind of the public by a small minority of "secular fundamentalists" who fought against the use of moral language in liberal advocacy. Wallis argues that "personal and social responsibility are both at the heart of religion." Republicans emphasize personal responsibility, while Democrats emphasize social responsibility. In his insistence on finding a balance, Wallis is moderate and centrist.Wallis is also pro-life, and chides the Democrats for their lack of openness to religious folk who oppose abortion but are otherwise sympathetic to liberal causes. Wallis also chides Republicans for the lack of a "consistent ethic of life" among those who oppose abortion but support the death penalty. Wallis is pro-gay, but prefers civil unions to gay marriage out of respect for those who hold firmly to religious tradition.So much for Wallis' centrist positions. In other respects, Wallis is to the left of most Democrats. Poverty is the issue closest to his heart. Indeed, he argues that poverty is the theme which, after idolatry, was of greatest concern to the Biblical prophets. Poverty, he argues, is much more of a biblical issue than homosexuality, which is briefly mentioned in the Bible, or abortion, which is mentioned not at all. In doing so, Wallis appeals directly to Scripture, rather than to the church traditions which have evolved over centuries as the denominations became established and made accommodation with political power and privilege.On foreign policy issues, Wallis is on the neo-pacifist left. In addition to opposing the Iraq War, Wallis opposed the use of military force in Afghanistan because of concern over casualties to Afghan civilians caught in the crossfire. Some on the left who opposed the Afghan War seemed to be less anti-war than anti-American. Wallis, however, does not fit into that category. He is not among those who saw 9/11 as "chickens coming home to roost" and he recognizes that the attackers did not fit into the category of poor and oppressed. He admits that "the peace movement does sometimes underestimate the problem of evil." Indeed, I find his perspective on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict underestimates the problem of evil within the Palestinian resistance to occupation.The easiest way to understand Wallis, who is white, is to realize that he ministers to an inner city church in Washington, DC with a heavily African-American membership. Wallis views are more in the tradition of black ministers like Dr. Martin Luther King than Rev. Billy Graham. Wallis also identifies with 19th century white evangelicals like William Jennings Bryan, a pacifist who resigned from Woodrow Wilson's cabinet over America's movement toward entry into World War I.Even where Wallis is radical, he is moderate in tone. Increasingly, hear from liberals that the only way to fight against the President's bully pulpit is to be confrontational. Wallis urges those who oppose established power to present alternatives, not just register their anger. Wallis believes in reconciliation. In framing social justice in religious terms, he believes that draw some elements of the religious right toward the center. Wallis argues that there are three major poles in American politics: conservative, liberal, and what he calls libertarian, which he defines as "liberal on cultural/moral issues and conservative on fiscal/economic and foreign policy." He proposes a fourth option, which he admits currently has no constituency, that would be traditional on moral issues, while being liberal on economic issues. Actually, I find what he calls libertarian to be more what I think of as centrist, and in Wallis, I may have finally discovered a "mirror-image centrist" who conservative where libertarian-centrists like William Weld are liberal, and liberal where they are conservative. This is a very original political book. Few readers are likely to go all the way with Wallis, but many can freshen their thinking by taking in the view from his unique perspective. Books25962@blogcritics.org Thu, 24 Feb 2005 16:00:07 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/02/20/150514.php Rick HellerJohn Shelby Spong, a retired Episcopal Bishop, has a radical idea for reforming the Christian religion--one that would remove God from the picture. Spong refers to himself as a nontheist, which he argues is not identical to being an atheist. He claims to believe in a God which is not supernatural, but is rather a philosophical concept in the tradition of Paul Tillich's Ground of Being. The book leads off with a quote from a letter by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian martyred for his opposition to Hitler. Our coming of age leads us to a true recognition of our situation before God. God would have us know that we must live as men who manage our lives without him. The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us (Mark 15.34). The God who lets us live in the world without the working hypothesis of God is the God before whom we stand continually. Before God and with God we live without God. ... He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us. This sets the tone for the "death of God" theology which inspired Spong when he first became a pastor in the 1960's. Spong considers as his guiding light John Robinson, an Anglican Bishop who in 1963, published Honest To God, a book which shook up the Church of England by denying the existence of the traditional God, and ruined his career in the process. While the 73 year old Bishop Spong considers himself a follower of the now-deceased Robinson, Spong does not make clear whether he himself has any proteges within the Episcopal Church.In 1998, Spong posted to the Internet twelve theses in, as he describes it, "Luther-like fashion." With such radical theses, one might reasonable question whether Bishop Spong can claim to be a Christian at all. Indeed, he expresses anxiety that he is following the path of colleagues like Don Cupitt, Lloyd Geering, and Robert Funk who he regards as having become post-Christians. Spong is reluctant to follow them that far.How can one be a Christian without believing in the divinity of Christ? Perhaps in the same way one can be a Keynesian without believing in the divinity of John Maynard Keynes. One may reasonably question whether the historical Jesus considered himself to be God. But is there any question that Jesus believed in God? According to Spong, It is important to document the fact that Christianity, at its inception, was pretheistic and only later and with slow developments was it, along with its Lord, overwhelmed by theistic concepts. Perhaps this is sloppy writing. Critics of the development of Trinitarian Christianity argue that Jesus' concept of God would have been the conventional Jewish one of a supernatural unitarian God, and his apotheosis into God himself came as Christianity spread out of the Jewish community to pagan Greeks and Romans. It's hard to imagine that Spong's nontheistic interpretation of God corresponds to that of the historical Jesus.Spong is willing to retain the traditional language of Christianity. While a nontheist, he is willing to speak of God, and to Jesus as the Son of God, and even to a "resurrection," though not one which physically occurred. Perhaps it does not bother me as much as it should. I welcome the changes as they come, but I have learned not to literalize liturgical words. I treat them as poetry, symbols, or illuminating phrases used by our forebears in faith to articulate their deepest yearnings. What is the value of retaining such language? Frankly, it seems inauthentic. Why doesn't Spong just chuck it and become a post-Christian? Perhaps because he is reluctant to leave behind other nontheistic Christians, those whom he calls "the church in exile." Will Spong's attempts at reform flourish? This seems doubtful. The fastest growing churches currently are the Pentecostal ones, those with the greatest emphasis on supernaturalism. The belief in a loving God and an afterlife are clearly the greatest "selling points" for religion. Why is it that a simple theism, stripped of toxic elements such as the belief in the exclusive legitimacy in one particular path, is so hard to sustain? Theistic religions like Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Greco-Roman paganism all have beliefs of obviously legendary character. These legends are clearly false, with the possible exception of those of the one True Religion, and likely false in all of them. Yet what unites these religions is that there is an unseen power responsible for the existence of the universe, and that it is possible to have a personal relationship with it. Could that basic intuition of so many people be true?If there is, there are few religious options to serve it. The most liberal denominations, such as Unitarian Universalism and Reform Judaism, are like Bishop Spong, doubtful about a theistic God. Less liberal denominations retain traditional liturgical formulations. Those who have theistic intuitions have little choice but to accept the baggage of traditional denominations.Is there a need for a reformation of Christianity which would purge it of obvious superstition? Yes. These superstitions are not innocent tales, but form the basis of excluding others from care and concern. Has Bishop Spong found the right formulation for a neo-Christianity? No. His vision is too austere to win over the masses. It is an enlightened secularism which fails to provide an alluring alternative to the appeal of superstition and obscurantism. Books25745@blogcritics.org Sun, 20 Feb 2005 15:05:14 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/09/02/150458.php Rick HellerWhen I picked up America's Right Turn, a new book by Richard Viguerie and David Franke, I expected another tiresome political rant like those we've seen all to frequently this year. Instead, it's a "how-to" manual for political pros combined with a memoir of Viguerie's career. Richard Viguerie was one of the pioneers in using direct mail for political fundraising. He describes the methods he used to secure names to add to his prized mailing list, how to write copy that motivates donors to write a check, and how to nurture this over time to build a movement. The last two chapters discuss the Internet, and online fundraising during the primary season for the 2004 presidential election. There is also a blog for the book.The tone of the book is analytical rather than polemical. While the authors are strongly conservative, they express admiration for pioneering liberal fundraisers such as the McGovern campaign's direct mail honcho Morris Dees and Howard Dean's Internet operation. It's curious to read that the 1950's were a time of liberal hegemony, as the book argues, since it's conventional nowadays to see the 1950's as a very conservative time. But while the public may have been viscerally conservative, conservatism as an intellectual movement was moribund until William Buckley founded National Review. The book describes the steps taken to raise money and organize a movement to the point where we may be entering a period of conservative dominance of the media.Anyone seeking to build a political movement, whether conservative, liberal, or centrist, can benefit from reading this work. However, the techniques of direct mail fundraising are not completely transferrable to Internet operations. Because of the cost of postage, direct mail must be narrowly targeted to potential sympathizers in order to produce positive returns. Email, being virtually free, has generated widely broadcast, untargeted emails which have become known as spam. As a result, any unsolicited emails, even those narrowly targeted, have been stigmatized. Internet fundraising operations must therefore find ways to pull in potential donors, rather than pushing their message onto an overwhelmed public. Books19388@blogcritics.org Thu, 2 Sep 2004 15:04:58 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/07/31/224058.php Rick HellerThe Serenity Prayer is associated with Alcoholic's Anonymous, but few know its origins, and it is sometimes misattributed as an medieval German prayer. In fact, it was composed in 1943 for a church service in Massachusetts by Reinhold Niebuhr, a German-American born in Missouri. It first appeared in print in the 1944 Book of Prayers and Services for the Armed Forces of the United States. As originally written, the Serenity Prayer was God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other. Over time, it is been changed into the first person, and is more commonly recited as God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference. Niebuhr was one of the best-know Protestant theologians of the 20th century, and this book serves partly as a biography and memoir of her father by his daughter, Elisabeth Sifton. Niebuhr was a liberal, indeed a long-time Socialist, a friend of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and an influence on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He traveled frequently to Germany during the interwar years, and hosted German theologian Paul Tillich in New York when Tillich went into exile during the Hitler years. Tillich served as an inverse Tokyo Rose during the war, broadcasting anti-Nazi propaganda in German which were transmitted to Germany by the U.S. War Department. Niebuhr was also close to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who remained in Germany, and was executed in the closing days of the Third Reich. Niebuhr traveled to the Soviet Union in 1930, and returned an anti-Communist. He was also an early anti-Nazi, and broke with many friends who counseled pacifism during World War II, seeing in them a blind absolutist faith differing in content but not form from the right-wing fundamentalists who he also opposed. Niebuhr was one of the founders of the liberal Americans for Democratic Action, but he was no naive liberal. According to his daughter, When the fatuously optimistic Unitarian Reverend John Haynes Holmes opined in 1931 that Europe was "slowly but surely approaching the longed-for goal of harmony and peace," a Niebuhr rebuke thundered back" "Let Liberal Churches Stop Fooling Themselves!" Elisabeth Sifton writes with grace and wit, as befits someone who is a senior vice president at the publishing house of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. She relates that in his declining years friends would send along ghastly samples of Serenity Prayer kitsch they'd encountered, for they knew the response would be disbelieving laughter, and they wanted to cheer Pa up when he was in his melancholic phase. Painted trays or crocheted hymn-book covers, say. I've always thought that "less is more," and the serenity prayer captures a great deal of wisdom in a few short phrases. It is moving to realize that Niebuhr wrote it at a dark time when many lives were in jeopardy and it was no easy task to be serene. Books18125@blogcritics.org Sat, 31 Jul 2004 22:40:58 EDT