Just FYI, a researcher at UCSF has recently reported finding a virus that may be causing CCD.

I find that even as an agnostic--in the Huxleyan sense of "no knowledge without evidence"--I do find much in religious traditions to admire and that the search for the ineffable can be quite satisfying. I'm a great fan of Armstrong's and her books...but also a respectful critic of some of her thinking.

In general, I understand Armstrong's arguments about the relationship of logos and mythos, but I find that the stark divide between the two can be problematic. It's a common division that ends up functioning to excuse religion from intellectual and moral rigor. It also fundamentally misunderstands "meaning." John Dewey and George Herbert Mead argued that meaning is derived from the use of an idea; that is, you know what something (an event, an object, an idea) means by the way you interact with it. Science and Religion aren't two opposing systems giving us different aspects of life; they are two different ways of coming to understand (of interacting) with things. Human beings derive knowledge through interaction, be it scientific or religion knowledge. Religion and Science are different in quality, not in kind; therefore, it is not only legitimate, but essential that we compare them and criticize their relative strengths and weaknesses. In a shrinking world of dramatic cultural pluralism where ethno-religious violence is always bubbling, we can no longer afford Plato's (or more recently Stephen J. Gould's) categorical splitting of religion from science (Gould's "separate magesteria"...blech).

Armstrong's efforts to salvage religion from secular/scientific critique often slide into apology. Justifying the Koran's (or Bible's) brutality by interpreting the passage as a call to peace collapses the complexities of religious text and practice and paralyzes our ability to evaluate them, to produce moral judgments of the usefullness of a particular belief. Armstrong argues that those who say the Koran (or Bible) are violent texts merely misunderstand them. But the fact that millions of people believe and act in their religion counter to Armgstrong's "true" interpretation demonstrates that the text means different things to different people in different contexts. Again, the meaning of a religion (or a passage in a religious text) emerges from the way people interact with it and enact it in the world--the right interpretation isn't a thing that if we all look hard enough we'll all come to the same conclusion, especially not in a world where a single religious tradition is straddling thousands of different cultural, social and economic contexts.

A better tack would be to take the social scientific stance that religions are vastly complex--the major traditions are thousands of years old, they encompass millions of diverse people, their texts are internally inconsistent and contradictory, and they contain both the impetus to violence and the call to peace. This would open up to more nuanced and targeted critiques of the immoralities of religious meaning in practice. It would also enable the kinds of critiques that Daniel Dennett calls for in his most recent book, where we can make rational decisions about what needs to be excised from our religious traditions, what no longer "works" in the world as we experience it now, not least of which are those major aspects of Islam and Christianity which push to tight community isolation and violence to outsiders.

Ignoring people is the precise wrong way to deal with bad ideas. Although I would agree that one must choose one's battles, confronting a cultural pundit with as much power and as loud a voice as Flanagan requires many and loud responses.

Excuse the interruption folks:

Freaky the people you run into online on a discussion board. Yeah, it's me, and I'm glad you liked the class. I'm a prof at SJSU now. Look me up. I'd like to hear what great things you're up to.

We know return you to your regularly scheduled Salon.com bitch fest.

But it's difficult for me to know exactly why. I saw an extended "making of" commercial in the "pre-show entertainment" at a local AMC, and had to get up and leave. Mark Bingham was a friend of mine, and I just don't think I'll ever be ready to see someone else "play" him as an actor; and I will never be ready to watch a dramatization of his death.

Mark was a dear friend to me who helped me through a particularly difficult year of my life just before his death. Although I'm sure Mark had a hand in fighting back and he is a hero for many, my memories of mark include him throwing M&Ms at my head at 2 a.m. in a hotel room because he was drugged out of his mind after a rugby injury; earlier that day he had lip-synched "Don't Cry For Me Argentina" (the Madonna version, of course) at a gay bar after our rugby match. His last email to me before he died told me to "take the leap, trust, and get what I wanted out of life."

I understand why people might want to see a film about Flight 93, but for me, it feels sacriligeous, or off. The Mark I knew isn't the Mark I see on screens or hear politicians or journalists talk about. I still miss him, five years later.