"My list:
- Faith that the universe makes sense
- Assuming binary logic applies everywhere
- Belief that life is fair
- Faith we can be objective
- Faith technology will save us
- Assuming Intelligence > Wisdom"

A Guide to Peaceful Coexistence in an Age of Culture Wars.
"This blog is intended for every person who has someone in their family, or at work, or in their apartment building or neighborhood, or on TV, who doesn't make sense at all. Maybe it is a teacher at your school who refuses to teach evolution. Maybe it is the opposite: someone who insisted that business meetings can no longer start with a prayer.

This blog will try to articulate both sides of these difficult culture-wars issues. The goal is not to convince or convert the other side, but just to show that intelligent people of good will can have good reasons for believing ideas that seem crazy or stupid to others."

By Adam Laats. Feed:
http://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/feed/

"In practice, all that “the exchange rate is the purview of the Treasury” means is that no official other the Treasury secretary is supposed to talk about it (and even he isn’t supposed to say very much). That strikes me as a shame. Perhaps if government officials could talk about the exchange rate forthrightly, there would be more understanding of the issues and more rational policy discussions.

Such discussions would start with some basic economics. The desire to trade with other countries or invest in them is what gives rise to the market for foreign exchange. You need euros to travel in Spain or to buy a German government bond, so you need a way to exchange currencies."

"'The Metaphor Program will exploit the fact that metaphors are pervasive in everyday talk and reveal the underlying beliefs and worldviews of members of a culture,' declared an open solicitation for researchers released last week. [...]

The assumption is that common turns of phrase, dissected and reassembled through cognitive linguistics, could say something about the views of those citizens that they might not be able to say themselves."

"Bolivia is set to pass the world's first laws granting all nature equal rights to humans. The Law of Mother Earth, now agreed by politicians and grassroots social groups, redefines the country's rich mineral deposits as 'blessings' and is expected to lead to radical new conservation and social measures to reduce pollution and control industry. [...]

The law, which is part of a complete restructuring of the Bolivian legal system following a change of constitution in 2009, has been heavily influenced by a resurgent indigenous Andean spiritual world view which places the environment and the earth deity known as the Pachamama at the centre of all life. Humans are considered equal to all other entities."

"...I want to propose another way of thinking, one that regards human cultures not as completely independent forces changing the world, but as strategies that people develop in order to adjust to the natural world and exploit its resources. Instead of making nature a subset of culture [...] historians might see culture as a subset of nature. We can think of this approach, following the lead of biologists, as redefining culture as a mental response to opportunities or pressures posed by the natural environment. In other words, culture can be defined as a form of 'adaptation.'
[...]
In biology the evolutionist tries to explain change over time by constructing what evolutionary biologist Ernst W. Mayr calls a 'historical narrative.' [...] Why did this trait appear in an organism when it did, what function did it serve? How did it reshape the whole organism and help it reproduce itself? When did the trait decline and disappear?"

"Those keen to adopt mindfulness training as a mere means to a happier life ignore the fact that the ideas Buddhists have traditionally wanted people to be mindful of are not necessarily comfortable ones, even if they ultimately lead the way to nirvana. Being mindful of the flavour of freshly brewed coffee or the beauty of a common sparrow is one thing; fostering awareness of the emptiness at the heart of the self quite another. [...] If we can find practical, secular advice in the works of Buddhists, stoics and saints, so be it. If Montaigne can soothe your troubled soul, take the balm. The problem is that ways of living and thinking which offer, and demand, so much more, are simply being looted to fill a toolbox for the crass engineering of positive thoughts and warm emotions. The looters are at best blind to the deeper riches on offer, at worst disfiguring the very source of their ill-gotten riches." Via Twitter/microphilosophy.

Reviews "The case for God" by Karen Armstrong. "...in the past, people tended to break arguments into two groups for which she uses the Greek terms logos and mythos. Logos reflects practical, immediate reasoning -- how do we build that aqueduct, what can we make from this wood, which crop would grow best in that field? Mythos is more aimed at the why -- what does it mean that my friend has died, how can I recapture the joy I felt in a moment of pure experience, how can I find meaning and peace among the world's noise and violence? [...] When we see those past societies as ignorant and driven out of unreasoning 'myths' it's because we are the oddities of history. Having acquired so much new data to feed logos over such a short time, we've become completely centered in scientific reasoning and entirely dismissive of mythos [...]"

"...the oft-heard claim that the death of a language means the death of a culture puts the cart before the horse. When the culture dies, naturally the language dies along with it. The reverse, however, is not necessarily true. Groups do not find themselves in the bizarre circumstance of having all of their traditional cultural accoutrements in hand only to find themselves incapable of indigenous expression because they no longer speak the corresponding language. Native American groups would bristle at the idea that they are no longer meaningfully 'Indian' simply because they no longer speak their ancestral tongue. [...] The main loss when a language dies is not cultural but aesthetic. [...] As we assess our linguistic future as a species, a basic question remains. Would it be inherently evil if there were not 6,000 spoken languages but one?"

"...we need to remember that reason and empiricism are tools, and like any tools, they have their limitations. Reason cannot tell the carpenter what to build or what not to build, or why. Science and technology may influence destiny but they cannot tell us who we are or where we need to go. They cannot shape a vision or offer moral guidance. Reason can't keep a family together or avoid conflict within a community.
This gets to my main thesis here, which is that reason must be understood in context. [...] To be clear: I'm not arguing against reason but for better marketing of it!
Can we package the idea of a rational world in simple terms?"

"The planet is not in trouble. Barring an impact with a large asteroid, it will go on happily orbiting the sun no matter what we do. Even if we detonate all the Bombs and reduce life on earth to a few remnant cyanobacteria, they will calmly begin evolving new species, just as they did a few billion years ago. The planet is not afraid of us.
The creatures that currently inhabit the earth are in trouble, of course. [...] The planet's biodiversity and its biogeochemical cycles are threatened, without doubt. [...] The question is not whether we can manage the biosphere -- we can't. The question is whether we can manage ourselves, our numbers, greed, arrogance, and waste, and whether we can bring forth a new world of ideas that are compatible with the planet, so the planet will allow them to persist."

Maybe this is a compilation of extracts? It just doesn't hang together well as an article, but the ideas are big. In summary: The Waldseemüller map of 1507 showed an outline of America. Copernicus, a cosmographer (seeing geography and astronomy as a single field, and not hindered by today's insistence on specialisation), had been looking for evidence to help refute the old model of the cosmos (with Earth as the centre, and with anomalies explained as God's will). The presence of the American continent in an area which theoretically should have been deep under water gave him useful material to work with. Thus, the mapmaker - Martin Waldseemüller - and his colleague, Matthias Ringmann - had unknowingly assisted one of the primary actors in the Scientific Revolution.

"[Barbara Ehrenreich] kept encountering the same smiling insistence elsewhere that a positive outlook itself was the solution to problems. It had infiltrated the large career-counseling industry that serves the unemployed; the Ivy League, where 'positive psychology' has nested in the curriculum; the best-seller list, where 'The Secret' has taken up residence; mega-churches run by evangelists; and conferences for motivational speakers.
Then the financial crisis hit. 'Wham,' she said. 'It was so clear to me that it was connected.' The relentlessly optimistic forecasts about subprime mortgages and endless increases in real estate values were the product of the positive-thinking culture. One of the fundamental tenets of the literature, Ms. Ehrenreich said, is to surround yourself with other positive thinkers and 'get rid of negative people.'"

Direct link to the PDF (200 KB). "...the purpose of this article is to investigate how metaphors have construed and communicated the human-Nature relationship in various cultures and different time periods. [...The anthropocentric worldview places] the human being at the center of the Earth and even the Universe. This worldview is often associated with a utilitarian attitude towards Nature. That is, it considers Nature to be an instrument for human ends without taking into reasonable account the needs and rights of other life forms and Earth systems themselves. [...The biocentric worldview places] the biosphere at the center of a person's way of life, thought and feeling. It represents a partnership model between humans and Nature, one of its main tenets being the belief
that the human is a member of the web of life rather than its master or even its steward."

"In German, the noun for bridge, Brücke, is feminine. In French, pont is masculine. [In describing a new bridge] German speakers saw prototypically female features; French speakers, masculine ones. Similarly, Germans describe keys (Schlüssel) with words such as hard, heavy, jagged, and metal, while to Spaniards keys (llaves) are golden, intricate, little, and lovely. Guess which language construes key as masculine and which as feminine? [...] while English says 'she broke the bowl' even if it smashed accidentally (she dropped something on it, say), Spanish and Japanese describe the same event more like 'the bowl broke itself.' 'When we show people video of the same event,' says [Lera Boroditsky], 'English speakers remember who was to blame even in an accident, but Spanish and Japanese speakers remember it less well than they do intentional actions. It raises questions about whether language affects even something as basic as how we construct our ideas of causality.'"

Inaugural Spectator Lecture, Royal Geographic Society, London, 30 April 2009. "...I do not know a single thing that can be said about America whose reverse is not also true." I tried to extract bits as a summary, but gave up; the thing is bigger than Texas and I'm still not sure what it's about. Great reading.