Letters to the Editor
J.C. Miller
Published Letters: 322 Editor's Choice: 34
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the selfish gene
[Read the article: Dead man's sperm]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]“Then again, it creates kids who never had a living father.”
Huh?
a) What does being a good, available male caregiver and role model for a child have to do with some scrambled DNA?
b) And in the context of what is in the best interests of a child, is there necessarily a problem with there not being an identifiable “father” (whatever that term could possibly mean)?
An after-the-fact suggestion which might preserve the best interests of any child resulting from these misguided efforts: allow the soldier’s parents the choice of donating the sperm to a sperm bank on the conditions that all identifying information is destroyed and that the identities of any recipient females are never revealed to the parents. Facing that choice might help them sort out their underlying motives and drives.
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religion and nature
[Read the article: God and gorillas]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Ya know, if you guys would look up once in a while from ducking each other’s punches, you might catch a glimpse of something important happening here – a vast and invisible online throng struggling to distill meaning from an increasingly dystopian world.
As noted (David W., Ktwdawg), terminology is important here. Spirituality, or transpersonal experience, is the individual’s endorsement of meaning, purpose, or design that is at the same time transcendent of and participated in by self and others. Religion is generally taken to describe something entirely additive to spirituality: an organized set of beliefs, code of behavior and prescribed practices which includes transpersonal elements (e.g. gods, salvation) as rewards, punishers, agents, authorities – all typically and historically organized and administered by a patriarchy. To the extent that prescribed behavior is at the core of the development of religion, it is difficult to view it as other than being about social control.
The distinctions are important because of the implications for moral development and access to the transpersonal. In religions normative behavior tends to be defined and codified by an authority or ruling patriarchy, and perceived access to the transpersonal is awarded to those who conform. The prescribed behaviors tend to express needs of the patriarchy related to sexual behaviors, property, and authority. In spiritual traditions, like early Christian Gnostics, the individual is empowered to access the transpersonal directly through knowledge of self and inner experience. Insight versus authority. Authenticity versus compliance. This leads some of us to the heterodox view that religion in fact precludes moral development.
One of the most important and least commented-on recent pieces in Salon was a review of Barbara Ehrenreich’s book on collective joy. The early Christian use of rhythmic movement to experience collective joy and ecstatic states was egalitarian, accessible, and socially bonding, and was disallowed because the direct access to transpersonal experience ran counter to the needs of religious structures to control behavior. What patriarchy was in competition with was a profound, existential and archetypal representation of safety that resonated with and recapitulated the use of coordinated group movement over millions of years of evolutionary history to provide for survival. That is, transpersonal experience courtesy of evolution.
Without evolutionary history, it is in fact impossible to conceive of moral behavior. What could it mean to act morally, without being driven to act immorally? Rape, killing, infanticide, siblicide, genocide - all were at some time, in some evolutionary context, advantageous, which is why we carry those capacities and drives within each of us, encoded in our DNA. Without those drives to do harm rewarded by personal gain and without the free choice to act on them, there could be no transcendent meaning for altruistic choices, nor for salvation. And if we choose to act against our own self-interest, we are informed by the capacity evolution has provided us to “feel” (empathize with) the suffering of another, something we should not be able to “know”. Again, transpersonal experience courtesy of a shared evolutionary history and access to inner experience.
BTW, DurianJoe – there is no puzzle about something coming from nothing, because there is neither “something” nor “nothing”. Language and thought are very practical evolutionary adaptations, but they don’t necessarily have anything to do with what is real. The structure of language plays tricks on us. Your puzzle, created by language, presupposes things (See?, “things”?, WTF? Where did that come from? We made up “things”.) which simply have no reality, like “something” and “nothing”. The solution: stop thinking, erase language, erase “something” and “nothing”. Now you have your answer – there is no puzzle. Really. I wouldn’t mislead you on this.
The privileged positions of thought and reason have more to do with utility and power than with what is real, and ultimately they limit our understanding.
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we are outraged
[Read the article: Paris: F-bombs, n-bombs and a "public school bitch"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]OK, so if Sarah Silverman uses a cultural or racial slur to tag an individual or group, we can see that the humor lies not in our feelings of superiority or hatred (one hopes) but in our discomfort and in the absurdity of the underlying fears, ignorance, and beliefs that groups or individuals could be attributed traits based on content-free utterances (“nigger”, “faggot”) that ultimately have no meaning other than what we are trained to award them. The joke is that we invest the power of a nuclear device in, and allow ourselves to be terrified by, empty sounds and symbols which in actuality have no more import and meaning for relating to groups or individuals than an unintelligible grunt. We award magical power to empty constructions, and part of Silverman’s brilliance is that she helps us learn experientially that our knee-jerk impulse to be outraged is, in fact, what helps give the black magic its power.
Paris is no Silverman, but do we know that she is racist or homophobic? We do know this: she uses black magic – utterances which are completely meaningless but carry the immense power our fear and ignorance give them – to elicit our outrage. She seems to have us in a trance, a spell. And that does seem newsworthy.