Feb/100
Letters From Science
(Thanks, Phil.)
Three open letters from Science to:
and Astrology.
These go back to the general theme of my last post, and they’re funny, insightful, and spot-on. Worth the read.
-Jay
Feb/101
What Happened To The Science Shows?
Several people have sent me links recently to an article at The Onion lamenting the sad state of science programming on television these days. Interestingly, The Onion didn’t even need to add much satire to the article.
I have fond memories of watching shows like The Operation on The Discovery Channel back in the early 1990’s. A typical episode would introduce the viewer to a patient, describe his condition, explain the surgery he was about to receive, show about 30 minutes of surgery footage, and close with a post-op visit with the patient. The surgery segments were fairly graphic, as one might expect, but at the end of the program I’d learned a few things.
These days, I’m more likely to find a show purporting to prove t hat JFK was assassinated by a conspiracy between the Freemasons and the Russian Mafia because he was getting ready to expose the truth about the Roswell aliens and their connection to the destruction of Atlantis.
It’s absurd.
A quick glance at the program lineup for The Discovery Channel today shows eight episodes of Cash Cab, six episodes of Verminators, four episodes of Man vs. Wild and a handful of other programs (including one which I initially misread as Solving History with Oily Steeds…). Not much here I’d really call science. The only really sciency program I can come up with on Discovery these days is Mythbusters, and even as cool as that show is, it sometimes veers a little too far into spectacle.
A check of The Learning Channel’s schedule paints a similar picture – lots of shows about large families, fashion, and being pregnant, but scarcely a scintilla of scientific programming.
At this point, I’m almost scared to look at The History Channel, but here we go…
Let’s see – a lot of infomercials, UFO programs, and Monster Quest episodes (although I may have to check out the episode on the Hillbilly Beast of Kentucky…), but only a little in the way of History. (I know. The History Channel was never really positioned as a science channel, but it used to be a lot more geared towards educational programming than the infotational material it shows now.)
There is really only one good place to go for science programming these days – PBS.
PBS runs some excellent, well-researched programs such as Scientific American Frontiers, hosted by Alan Alda, and the venerable NOVA.
I wish there were more offerings like these…
-Jay
Feb/102
Autism and Antivaccination: High Order Woo (Updated)
The supposed link between childhood vaccinations and autism is not something I have much occasion to write about, largely because people like Orac at Respectful Insolence already have that topic covered very well.
That said, Orac has a post up now addressing the General Medical Council’s ruling in the matter of Andrew Wakefield. (The GMC is the regulating body for physicians in the UK, and Andrew Wakefield is the “researcher” who published the 1998 study claiming to link autisim spectrum disorders to the MMR vaccine.)
Any attempt on my part to summarize Orac’s blistering discussion of the ruling would fail to do justice to it, so I encourage folks to click over and read the post itself.
I will highlight one part, which serves as a stark example of the consequences of Wakefield’s fraud and the abject lunacy that it supports:
Indeed, in 2008, 14 years after measles had been declared under control in the U.K., the Health Protection Agency stated that, as a result of almost a decade of low mumps-measles-rubella (MMR) vaccination coverage across the UK, “the number of children susceptible to measles is now sufficient to support the continuous spread of measles” and declared measles to be endemic again in the U.K.
Stop and think about that. A disease that had been controlled is now once again endemic due to the repercussions of a fraudulent study.
This is what happens when people stop thinking critically.
(UPDATE) Autism spectrum disorders are serious conditions that merit serious study, and families affected by them are understandably passionate about the topic. Bogus studies like Wakefield’s (and subsequent studies that presuppose Wakefield’s conclusions) make it that much harder for people to sort out the good information from the bad, and ultimately hinder rather than advance the search to understand ASDs.
(UPDATE 2) The Lancet has issued a full retraction of the 1998 Wakefield paper (thanks again to Orac).
-Jay
Jan/104
Darth Vader, Sci-Fi, and Religion
Over at Exploring Our Matrix, James McGrath has a short post raising the question “should Darth Vader be forgiven if he repents?”
(James often writes about the relationships between science fiction and religion, and with good reason – there are almost endless opportunities to compare and contrast our notions of religion with those in various sci-fi milieus, and sci-fi gives us a mechanism to explore moral and ethical issues in ways we can’t readily do in real life.)
I think it’s a very interesting question, particularly when you start peeling away the layers.
As the question is posed, I interpret it as asking “can someone be so wicked that forgiveness is impossible”? (If I’m misinterpreting, hopefully James will let me know.)
James poses some discussion-prompting questions as follow-ups: Should Vader have stood trial? Been executed? Set free?
Before I go any further, I need to lay out a few assumptions:
- Anyone reading this is assumed to be at least passingly familiar with the life and career of Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader.
- For purposes of this post, the Star Wars canon is taken to be the six theatrical films and the Cartoon Network series Clone Wars. This is mainly because I’m unfamiliar with the materials that make up the expanded canon.
- Han shot first.
Now, if we take the original question, “should Darth Vader be forgiven if he repents?” and attempt to answer it from a familiar Christian perspective, the answer would probably be a fairly straightforward “yes”. But that’s a boring answer.
To go deeper, we need to look at the follow-ups.
I grew up Catholic. A prominent feature of Catholicism is the sacrament of Reconciliation. It used to be called Confession, which always suggested to me something along the lines of the Spanish Inquisition, complete with tongue pincers and thumbscrews. The basic Catholic Reconciliation scenario involves a one-to-one chat with a priest, wherein the congregant ‘fesses up to his transgressions, the priest says a little prayer and gives the repentant congregant some sort of assignment (such as ten Hail Marys) to perform whilst reflecting upon his sins.1
The sinner is then declared to be right with God, and can go along his merry way.2
Except that’s really not all there is to it.
There remains the often significant matter of getting right with the folks that were on the bad end of the transgression. It’s becoming more common for priests to include some sort of restitution clause in the post-confession assignment, encouraging people to take personal responsibility for their actions and deal with the consequences of them.
That’s where James’ other questions come into play.
In the Star Wars mythology, Darth Vader was either directly responsible for or complicit in the deaths of millions, if not billions of people. He tortured his daughter, maimed his son, encased a guy in metal, and dispatched minions to kill cute, fuzzy little spear-wielding teddy bears.3
If we had someone with that sort of rap sheet in custody, I don’t think anyone would try to argue that he should be released – he just has too much to answer for even if he is genuinely remorseful. I suppose one could argue that he was insane, or “just following orders”, but neither of those excuses seem sufficient to let him go free.
The bottom line is that if we took Darth Vader and dropped him into our world, he could be forgiven for his sins in the religious sense of the term, but that he would still have to accept the secular consequences of his crime – in other words he’d spend the rest of his life in jail or perhaps face execution.4
Now, let’s look at things from within the Star Wars universe.
The first thing to consider is that within the Star Wars universe, at least as I’ve defined the canon for this post, religion doesn’t seem to involve anything comparable to a Christian concept of God. The only mention I can recall is that C-3PO “thanks the maker” on occasion, but since he’s a robot, “maker” could just as easily refer to the person who put him together as it could to God.
The religion, such as it is, of the Star Wars universe appears to be centered on the Force. The Force, though, seems to be more of an energy field or kind of magic that people seek to understand and control rather than something that people regard as an object of worship. The Force also seems to lack any sort of agency or intent – it’s just kinda there, waiting to be used by people lucky enough to have a high midichlorian count.5
The Force, in other words, is morally neutral, and its energy/magic can be brought to bear for good or ill, depending on the intent of the user. Morality in the Star Wars universe appears to depend not upon some extrinsic objective standard, but rather on that which maintains order and harmony within society.
This makes the question of Vader’s repentance and forgiveness more complicated. Vader didn’t “sin” in the sense that he transgressed against the will of the Force and made the Force upset. Rather, his “sin” was that he elected to use the power of the Force for his own selfish reasons rather than for the betterment of his society as a whole. In this context, “redemption” means “turning away from the dark side” and using the power for unselfish reasons, and doesn’t carry the connotation of “making the Force” happy or otherwise placating it.
In a similar vein, the Force can’t “forgive” Vader. The Force itself doesn’t care how it is used – at the heart of the matter it’s just a resource to be utilized. “Forgiveness” for Vader must be sought from those he hurt – Luke, Leia, all the Jedi younglings he killed, and so on. Luke forgives him, but there isn’t any opportunity for anyone else to.6
This leads us to whether Vader would have spent the rest of his life in prison (or faced execution) had he survived. I think that the situation remains the same as it was when we were considering his fate in our world – he still has an obscene amount of blood on his hands, and he still has an almost unimaginable debt to pay to society. I don’t think there’s any compelling reason to absolve him of the responsibility for his actions – that obligation remains regardless of the nature of any possible afterlife.
From here, it might be interesting to consider the philosophical ramifications we’d be faced with if we were to encounter a race of intelligent aliens. I’ll take up that topic in a future post.
-Jay
———-
1Many parishes these days have communal services where the intimidating one-on-one chat with the priest is replaced by the priest delivering some prayers and a short homily to the gathered congregants, who personally reflect on their sins. The one-on-one part is then offered as an option. It always seemed to me that the one-on-one approach harkened back to medieval days. It’s not much of a stretch to see how a priest who knew the details of the dark affairs of the nobility could use that knowledge as leverage. Anyway…
2No, there’s no sarcasm in this statement. Really. None.
3No sarcasm here, either. By the way, I always found the responses of Luke and Leia to the knowledge of their paternity to be bizarre. Luke’s response in Episode V seemed remarkably short-lived. Leia never really even gave any visible response at all. I would think that learning that your father was one of the most despicable, evil murderers in the galaxy might be more traumatic…
4Not much different than any other jailhouse conversion, really. Personally, I’ve always found it repulsive that some doctrines claim that someone like, say, Jeffrey Dahmer can be “saved” in prison, while the people that he raped, murdered, and mutilated might not be.
5Midichlorians (along with Jar-Jar Binks and Anakin Skywalker as a whiny brat) are a prime example of why George Lucas should not be allowed to write movies anymore. It’s not that endosymbiosis is a bad concept in and of itself, but its use here essentially turns the Jedi into accidents of birth rather than dedicated warriors who achieved their skills through years of study and practice.
6We don’t know, based on the films, whether ordinary people have any sort of consciousness or soul that persists after death, so we don’t know if Vader could seek their forgiveness after he died. We are told that the ability of the Jedi to appear as “Force Ghosts” is something that they only recently figured out how to do, so we have a precedent for a concept of soul, but I don’t think we have warrant to conclude that Vader could posthumously communicate with all of the people that he was responsible for killing.
Jan/100
Censoring the Dictionary
(NOTE: No sooner do I post this than I discover that the issue has been resolved by returning the dictionaries to the shelves, but making other dictionaries available. That seems like a reasonable solution, but the fact that this was even an issue in the first place is still absurd.)
Ed Brayton at Dispatches From The Culture Wars had an interesting article this morning.
It seems that school officials in Menifee, California have yanked the Merriam Webster’s 10th edition dictionary out of schools because, horror of horrors, it contains a definition for “oral sex”. (The original story reports that the dictionaries were used in fourth and fifth grade classrooms, and had been on the shelves for a few years.)
(There is an ambiguity in the above article, but a related article calls out the MW 10th edition Collegiate dictionary that I linked to above as the offending book. It does not appear to contain that specific entry, although it does contain entries for more specific acts.)
It’s difficult to read one of the comments by Betti Cadmus, spokeswoman for the Menifee Union School District, without snickering:
“It’s hard to sit and read the dictionary, but we’ll be looking to find other things of a graphic nature,” Cadmus said. She explained that other dictionary entries defining human anatomy would probably not be cause for alarm.
So, the Menifee school board is going to sit around with dictionaries looking up dirty words. I wonder how many of the Menifee school board members were doing exactly the same thing when they were in fifth grade? History is not without a sense of humor, it seems.
The fact of the matter is that by the fourth or fifth grade, many, if not most, of those kids have probably been exposed to most of those words, whether they’ve overheard them from older kids or adults, encountered them scrawled on the wall in the restroom, or picked up on them from movies or TV. That’s not to say we need to be encouraging 10-year-old kids to run around swearing like Gunnery Sergeant Hartman - far from it. One parent of students in the school system summed it up well:
“Censorship in the schools, really? Pretty soon the only dictionary in the school library will be the Bert and Ernie dictionary,” said Emanuel Chavez, the parent of second- and sixth-grade students. “If the kids are exposed to it, it’s up to the parents to explain it to them at their level.”
What a revolutionary thought! Parents actually doing something parenty! In America! In 2010!1
One big problem with this variety of censorship is how difficult it is to define what you’re looking to censor. It would be interesting to see if all of the school board members would be able to agree on a list of naughty words that would need to be absent in any approved dictionary. Maybe you start with the Carlin Seven and expand from there. But where do you end? The possibilities are mind-boggling.2
Another problem with censorship of this nature is defining precisely what your goals are. In this case, terms like “age appropriate” are tossed around, but it appears that the real motivation has more to do with the breathtakingly inane idea that if kids don’t know the terms for sexual acts, then they won’t figure them out on their own.3
The final decision on the fate of the dictionary in Menifee will be determined by a committee consisting of principals, teachers, parents, and district representatives.
Hopefully saner heads will prevail.
-Jay
———-
1I can still remember pretty clearly the look on my mom’s face when I, as a third grader, asked “Mom, what does “f*ck” mean?
2The mental picture of members of the school board sitting around a table discussing whether to ban the word “beaver” is both amusing and sad. The mental picture of members of the school board trying to decide whether they should still be referred to as “members” of the school board is just amusing.
3Considering how obsessed that we, as a society, are with sex, I’m often amazed at how we, as a society, are also largely terrified of it.
