Is yoga a religion?

An interesting legal debate, posted at The Immanent Frame. It arose from a recent legal case in Missouri, in which yoga centers objected to being subject to taxes, on the grounds that they are entitled to religious status.

As the four commenters point out, separating the religions from non-religions can be surprisingly tricky. Isaac Weiner also makes the point that ". . . offering tax exemptions for religious institutions or organizations inevitably entangles government and religion, rather than separating them."

Photo courtesy Flickruser lululemon

We use and defend the King James Bible

Bible for Today Baptist Church
Collingswood, New Jersey
September 16, 2007

This church has an interesting ad in the yellow pages. It proclaims “We use and defend the King James Bible.” Well, I thought, who doesn’t? I mean, most churches use a more modern translation of the Bible, but everyone loves the King James Version (KJV). That’s the one with the gorgeous language, the one that has influenced English literature so profoundly. As it turned out, I was about to discover a kind of church I had never heard of before, the King James-only church.

The ad contains other slogans about the church: “Fundamental; separated; Bible Believing”; “Verse by Verse Exposition and Teaching”; “Internet Church Broadcast – Live and On Demand Streaming 24/7”; and “The difference is worth the distance.” So I gathered that the church was using lots of modern technology; they weren’t Luddites, just strong believers in the KJV. I checked out their website.

It’s an incredibly colorful website, was my first thought. Ouch, my eyes! They have a webstore, news updates, a system for making online donations. Was this some kind of big local church I had somehow completely overlooked while driving around the area?

I clicked on a side link, BFT Baptist Church, and scrolled down a bit to find a photo of the pastor, Dr. D.A. Waite (a nice-looking older gentleman), and more information about the church itself. They describe themselves thus: “The Bible For Today Baptist Church is a unique church. We hold to all of the doctrines taught in the Bible that Baptists have always believed. We are a fundamental, independent, unaffiliated, pre-millennial, separated, Bible-believing Baptist church.”

I also discovered that BFT does not meet in a church building, but in the home of Dr. Waite, which is probably why I had never noticed it. According to the website, people drive from over an hour away to come and have “sweet family fellowship” at BFT. In addition, I learned that: “Our pianist, Mr. Dick Carroll, is one of the most accomplished musicians in the United States of America.” (Pretty big claim there – I’ll see about that.) The church uses the Defined King James Bible, a version I’ve never heard of before. This sounds interesting.

A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting. (Thoreau)

I like having ongoing projects – this blog is one of them, and it arose out of my earlier project of visiting a different church every Sunday for a year.

I’ve just begun a new project – reading all the novels Anthony Trollope wrote, in order. I’ve read large chunks of Trollope already (including the complete Palliser series), but it won’t be a hardship to read them again. Large amounts will have been forgotten, and will seem like new – and anyway, re-reading is one of the joys of being a reader.

So I’m one paragraph into his first novel, The MacDermotts of Ballycloran, and already there’s a highly quotable sentence:

There is a kind of gratification in seeing what one has never seen before, be it ever so little worth seeing; and the gratification is the greater if the chances be that one will never see it again.

Ah – spoken like a true traveler. And the sentiment works for those travelers who never get much past their own city or neighborhood as well as for those who seek out faraway lands. (I am reminded of Thoreau’s “I have travelled much in Concord,” and when I Googled that quotation to make sure I had it right, I found the one in the title of this post, which also seems appropriate here.)

Lydia Davis

I am in love with The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis. If you’ve never heard of her (like me, until about a month ago), you will likely be quite surprised by her work. She writes very, very short stories – some are just one or two lines. Her writing is funny, illuminating, mysterious. She somehow captures the mind in action, something that is hard to describe but wonderful to observe. Her work also accomplishes that most essential and magical work of good fiction – it somehow changes the way I think and see the world. I first noticed this when something happened in my own life, and I was thinking it over, and I suddenly realized that I was thinking like a person in a Lydia Davis story.


No one selection will really illustrate her work well, but here is a bit from “Examples of Confusion”:

Driving in the rain, I see a crumpled brown thing ahead in the middle of the road. I think it is an animal. I feel sadness for it and for all the animals I have been seeing in the road and by the edge of the road. When I come closer, I find that it is not an animal but a paper bag. Then there is a moment when my sadness from before is still there along with the paper bag, so that I appear to feel sadness for the paper bag.

That’s an example of capturing a thought, or emotion, or something, that I know I’ve had but have never been really conscious about, the way feelings bleed into inappropriate situations. Also, for me it brings up the memory of the rainy night my daughter was hit by a car and lying in the street, and then another driver ran over her – he said later that he saw something in the road, and thought it was a garbage bag. Kind of the opposite of what happens in Davis’ story, but surely another example of confusion. (My daughter recovered, by the way, after many months and many surgeries.)

Here's one of the amazon reviews:

Lydia Davis is a rare and wonderful writer, a word master with an uncanny ability to reveal the inner musings of the mind. These are short stories to savor and revisit.

I love this book.

Believing you are right even when you're not

I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things . . . it doesn’t frighten me.


Richard Feynman

Dogmatism is not an attitude found only in believers. Secularists can be dogmatic as well. I have just finished Robert A. Burton's On Being Certain: Believing you are right even when you're not. Burton is a neurologist who has studied the feeling of being certain. Quick summary from the back cover: "An increasing body of evidence suggests that feelings such as certainty stem from primitive areas of the brain and are independent of active, conscious reflection and reasoning.In other words, the feeling of knowing happens to us: we cannot make it happen."
 
Lest you think that this is somehow a put-down of the feeling of certainty, know that Burton is not dismissive of the "primitive areas of the brain," and that the book is not a polemic against belief, but rather what seems to me a very even-handed and eye-opening exploration of what happens when we are certain about anything - whether the belief in question is "I remember where my friend's house is," "I know what happened when the accident occurred," "I believe in God," or "There is no God." He notes that Richard Dawkins' "near-evangelical effort to convince the faithful of the folly of their convictions has the same zealous ring as those missionaries who feel it is their duty to convince the heathen."
 
But it's not all about religious or political belief - mostly fascinating stuff exploring hunches, intuition, the fact that we are blind to much more than we realize - a great read!
 
(Actually, the idea that you can't reason your way to belief, or talk yourself into belief fits in very well with the Christian concept of prevenient grace.)

The 2010 census and the nativity

An ad campaign to get Hispanics to participate in 2010 census, using the gospel story of Jesus’ birth, has been called "blasphemous" by other Latino groups.


This certainly seems like an odd way to get people to participate in the US census. Wasn’t the census as described in the gospels part of the evil Roman empire’s efforts to control their subject populations? Why would you want to associate yourself with that? Plus, the birth of Jesus is closely associated with the Flight to Egypt – the holy family getting out of town fast to avoid the authorities. Again, not a great association to present to members of Hispanic communities who may be wary of government officials.

At any rate, I’ve always thought that the census procedure as described in Luke sounds weird – having everyone go back to their home town to be counted? Why? How long did they have to stay there? What about old, sick, and (obviously) pregnant people? What if a husband and wife were from different towns? It turns out there is lots of scholarly speculation about the two censuses in the gospels (Matthew and Luke), whether they seem to correspond to anything we know about ancient history, and about whether or not it is possible to reconcile the two accounts:

"This passage has long been considered problematic by Biblical scholars, since it places the birth of Jesus around the time of the census in C.E. 6, whereas the Gospel of Matthew indicates a birth during or just after the reign of Herod the Great, who died in 4 B.C.E., ten years earlier. . . In addition, no other sources mention a world-wide (in this context, probably meaning 'the Roman world') census which would cover the population as a whole; those of Augustus covered Roman citizens only; and it was not the practice in Roman censuses to require people to return to their ancestral homes."

and

"Luke's statement that Joseph had to travel to Bethlehem 'because he was descended from the house and family of David' has often been called into question, since it appears to imply that people were required to return to their ancestral home; James Dunn wrote: "the idea of a census requiring individuals to move to the native town of long dead ancestors is hard to credit". . . . A papyrus from Egypt dated C.E. 104 requiring people to return to their homes for a census has sometimes been cited as evidence of a requirement to travel; however, this refers only to migrant workers returning to their family home, not their ancestral home. However, Raymond E. Brown suggested that “One cannot rule out the possibility that, since Romans often adapted their administration to local circumstances, a census conducted in Judea would respect the strong attachment of Jewish tribal and ancestral relationships.”

Source for quotes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Census_of_Quirinius

Nine astonishingly assymetrical buildings

I stumbled across this page (literally, using Stumble). I really like the Walt Disney Concert Hall. It looks as though it came out of The Sorcerer's Apprentice.

Reflexive non-sympathy

I’ve been thinking lately about an attitude you could call reflexive non-sympathy. It’s the attitude that some people seem to feel compelled to exhibit whenever they hear of someone who has had some sort of trouble that is in part or wholly due to that person’s own rotten choices. For example, when they hear of an obese person who loses a leg to diabetes, they immediately respond, “No sympathy here. He ate himself into poor health (and I resent paying his medical bills).” Or if they read about a drunk driver involved in a car accident, their first comment is, “Well, he deserved it. I’m just glad no innocent people were killed by that moron.” These kind of automatic responses are common - I've certainly said stuff like this myself, often enough.


If someone suggests that it’s possible to have even a modicum of sympathy for people who do bad things and make poor choices, the reflexive non-sympathizer is often enraged, as though the sympathizer is trying to convince people that obesity is a good thing or that drunk driving should be winked at.

Really, why should it be so hard to think that many people make very, very poor decisions and do really rotten things and nevertheless are not totally undeserving of some sympathy? It’s not as though this is an either/or situation, where you have to side one way or the other. If you can understand how some people, due to a likely complex set of circumstances, may have become obese, or alcoholics, or drug addicts, or debtors, or just general screw-ups, that doesn’t mean you think that obesity, alcoholism, drug addiction, bad spending habits, or stupidity are good things. It doesn’t mean you think they should escape the consequences of their actions, or that they should be celebrated as poor, poor victims. It just means that you can see how the situation might be a little more complex than “What an idiot. Off with his head!”

I can think of four reasons behind the barking of the reflexive non-sympathizer. 1) He or she believes in the value of stigma, and fears that showing any shred of sympathy for people who fail may weaken society (if we show any sympathy for compulsive gamblers, everyone will want to gamble); 2) he or she cannot imagine personally being so weak as to fail in these ways, yet even the thought of being so weak is terrifying and must be defended against, publically and immediately; 3) he or she may have been personally traumatized by someone who has done this bad thing, and desire others to hate and punish everyone who does these bad things; 3) he or she is hopeful that somehow life will be fair if a position of stern personal goodness is maintained (I don’t overeat or use drugs or abuse alcohol or spend irresponsibly or engage in immoral activity or treat people badly, so I will be OK. Bad things can and should happen to people who do all those bad things, but I should be safe.)

I’m also mystified a bit at the reflexive non-sympathizer’s sense that sympathy can be wasted – as though it is a tangible commodity, limited in supply, and that “spending” this commodity on the undeserving will somehow result in there being less of it available for the deserving. This seems almost like magical thinking – not least because it seems to assume that the undeserving will mystically benefit from sympathy felt by an unknown person.

The reflexive non-sympathizer reminds me of the student who doesn’t see the point of reading literature. I came across these students quite regularly. Their attitude was something like, “Why would I want to read about a loser like MacBeth, or Madame Bovary, or Raskolnikov, or Jay Gatsby? They are idiots who made a hash of their lives and deserved what they got.” Some students didn’t seem able to grasp the concept that it is quite possible to think that all the great losers of literature are not being held up as role models to emulate, but as case studies in understanding the human psyche – and that you can condemn their decisions and actions and yet also feel some sympathy for them when you understand how they came to be the type of person who does those bad things.

But, no. For them it just has to be X is bad, therefore anyone who does X is a bad person. No sympathy. End of story. Nothing to learn here. (Or anywhere, I fear.)

“it’s very unfortunate that Darwin was a white Brit”

In the Muslim world, creationism is increasingly popular. Oddly, from our point of view, it appeals to the modernizing Muslims, who want to do well in the global economy and at the same time stick to traditional values. Interesting analysis!

Cloud Nine is now Cloud Ten

I’ve been reading The Cloudspotter’s Guide: The Science, History and Culture of Clouds, by Gavin Pretor-Pinney. Pretor-Pinney is described on the back cover as “a former science nerd” who “has been obsessed with clouds since childhood.” He’s the founder of The Cloud Appreciation Society. Click on the link to see some great cloud photos (they make nice background photos for your computer screen) and lots of information.

The Cloudspotter’s Guide is the best kind of popular science book – fun to read, full of learning but not ponderously so, and about a really fascinating subject. I love reading about ordinary stuff I never really thought about before (the prime example of this kind of thing would be The Secret Life of Dust, an absolutely riveting book about . . . dust). It’s one of those books that, while you’re reading it, you constantly want to turn to someone and say, “Hey, listen to this. Did you know . . . . . .”

Cloud nomenclature began in the early 1800s, when a Quaker amateur meteorologist named Luke Howard proposed a classification system for clouds similar to the Linnean system in botany and zoology. In 1896 a Swedish meteorologist and an English one formed a Cloud Committee to develop an international system of cloud classification. This committee published The International Cloud Atlas. “Now published by the World Meteorological Organization, it is the undisputed authority on cloud classification, and a book that any serious cloudspotter should own,” according to Pretor-Pinney.

In the original 1896 edition, there were ten cloud genera, and Cumulonimbus clouds held the number nine spot. Cumulonimbus are thunderclouds, which can extend up to summits at 60,000 feet or more (taller than Mount Everest). So to be “on cloud nine” was to be on the very tallest cloud – up in the stratosphere.

As early as the second edition of the Cloud Atlas, though, the genera were rearranged, and Cumulonimbus was reassigned to the number ten spot. This didn’t matter to popular culture, of course. The phrase “on cloud nine” turned out to be a very sticky meme.

Sort of related: one of my favorite songs is the rather little-known “Cloudy” from Simon and Garfunkel’s Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme album.

Photo courtesy Flickruser kevindooley

Find us, and ye shall seek

Unitarian Universalist Church
Cherry Hill, New Jersey
September 9, 2007

Time to get back to visiting places that are more foreign to my experience. I’ve never been to a Unitarian Universalist (UU) church; the closest I’ve been to Unitarianism was the class I took on Ralph Waldo Emerson. A dizzying experience it was, too. If modern Unitarians are as mysterious, allusive, elusive, and just generally confounding as Emerson, visiting a UU church will be a strange trip indeed.

I do a little Wikiwork to prepare. According to Wiki, Unitarian Universalists are not united by creed, but rather united in their “shared search for spiritual growth.” They do not consider themselves Christians, though they trace their history back to the 1961 merger of two traditionally Christian groups, the Universalist Church in America and the American Unitarian Association. (So I think this will be the youngest denomination so far in my visits, dating back to only 1961.)

Of course, some of the churches I’ve visited so far are called non-Christian by other Christian groups. Many people who consider themselves Christians would tell me that Mormons and Christian Scientists are not Christians, and you could find someone somewhere who would say that anyone not in his or her denomination is non Christian. But visiting the UUs will be the first time I’m visiting a church that does not claim the Christian label for themselves.

Universalism, the belief that everyone will eventually be saved, is a very old doctrine. People find it in the writings of the earliest theologians, including Origen (second century), and St. Gregory of Nyssa (4th century). In the US, the Universalist Church of America was established in 1793, so it seems to me that you could say that the idea that no one will go to hell is real American “old-time religion.”

Unitarianism, the rejection of the doctrine of the Trinity, has been around a long, long time also. That’s not really very surprising, since Christianity arose out of Judaism, and it’s harder to get more adamantly monotheistic than Judaism.