Though nothing can bring back the hour
William Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”
Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;
In the faith that looks through death,
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
The Meanest Flower
January 14, 2023 by Leave a Comment
Attachment to Beliefs
July 18, 2022 by 1 Comment
However, even though beliefs are an intricate part of our identity, you don’t have to take this process of self analysis so personally. Consider the fact that none of us was born with any of our beliefs. They were all acquired in a combination of ways. Many of the beliefs that have the most profound impact on our lives were not even acquired by us as an act of free will. They were instilled by other people. And it probably won’t come as a surprise to anyone that usually the beliefs that cause us the most difficulty are those that were acquired from others without our conscious consent. By that I mean beliefs that we acquired when we were too young and uninformed to realize the negative implications of what we were being taught.
Mark Douglas
Tempus Fugit
July 4, 2022 by 4 Comments
As part of our relocation to the Boston area, we bought an old Victorian style house that was built in 1900. It has been a learning experience, because houses of that age have entire histories of construction, renovation, upkeep, and decline.
The fireplace in the living room has old tilework around it, which is original to the house. During prior renovations, the line of previous owners thankfully left this unique bit unchanged. At the top center of the tilework are winged cherubs holding a banner that reads, tempus fugit.
We looked up this phrase with the help of Google, and we found that it is translated as “time flies.” It originates with Virgil, in his Georgics, as tempus inreparabile fugit, or “it escapes, irretrievable time.” Wikipedia has an entire page for this phrase (link).
[Read more…]Arithmetic of Souls
June 26, 2022 by 2 Comments
There are two kinds of minds. One kind of mind can be reached with new evidence, and is capable of rational persuasion — even on subjects of ardent belief. The other kind of mind will not be persuaded, regardless of evidence or reason. It simply parrots, “this is my belief,” as a talisman against fear, learning and growth.
I cannot help the second kind of mind, but there are people of good will in this world who are reachable. For those folks, I offer this excerpt from Sam Harris. Some years ago, his writings presented me with evidence, of which I had been unaware, on the subject of abortion. I became persuaded that my views were, at best, primitive and uninformed. Perhaps this information can help others.
For context, this excerpt is taken from Letter to a Christian Nation, in which he was discussing anti-abortion arguments against stem cell research:
[Read more…]Farewell to Texas
June 26, 2022 by 11 Comments
Three weeks ago, my family bid farewell to Austin and made a long pilgrimage to Boston, starting a fresh chapter of life in New England.
My wife was born and raised in Texas. I moved around more during childhood and lived in a number of states, but Texas has been home for the bulk of my life, about 35 years. All four of our kids were born in the Lone Star State. And the bulk of our extended family lives there. So our relocation is, in many ways, a substantial dislocation.
[Read more…]COVID: Claims of Africa Information Suppression?
September 5, 2021 by 6 Comments
The Claim
Anti-vax folks I know shared an article with me from The Daily Reckoning, written by James Rickards. In this article, Rickards claims:
One of the reasons the per capita rate of infection and fatality in Sub-Saharan Africa has been so much lower than was expected at the start of the pandemic is because Africans routinely take hydroxychloroquine to prevent malaria.
Hydroxychloroquine is cheap and safe and seems to have excellent prophylactic properties against the COVID virus. Likewise, the drug Ivermectin, which is also cheap and safe, has had fantastic results in helping to mitigate a severe outbreak of the Delta variant of the virus in India…
Why have you not heard more about the role of hydroxychloroquine in Africa? Why have you not heard more about the role of Ivermectin in India? Why are both drugs not being more widely utilized to fight COVID?…
The answer is that Big Tech and Big Media have banned any discussion…
Is this true? What does a basic investigation turn up?
[Read more…]Church of Conspiracy: the Fauci Patents
August 29, 2021 by 4 Comments
As many have experienced, the COVID disinformation engine has jumped the shark. It has become nearly impossible to talk to friends and relatives about medicine and science. Those categories have been replaced with the mislabeling of “politics,” which is bizarre when the state of scientific knowledge remains unchanged whether we are standing among Democrats and Republicans in the US, or in a completely different political landscape in Europe or Asia. I’ve tried to engage and generally met with failure. The experience has been oddly similar to interfacing with young-earth creationists. The disinformation crowd has gone full fundamentalist, mingling misunderstanding with belligerence and brimstone.
This article is an adaptation from an email I sent to some of the anti-vaxxers I know. That dialogue has been long and unhappy, and it has since lapsed. But I was encouraged by others to post some of the content (of which there is a great deal), in the hopes that it might help a reader or two. I’m not sure how much energy I will assign to this effort, but at the least, I’ll put forward this installment…
[Read more…]Solution to Every Human Problem
July 20, 2021 by Leave a Comment
There is always an easy solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.
H. L. Mencken
Twitter Rage Antidote, by Sagan
June 18, 2021 by 11 Comments
I recently perused a relative’s Twitter feed, surveying the particular brand of rage that seems to fuel his worldview. And more recently still, I saw an interview with a professor who does research on the addictive nature of outrage, and how the anger products being offered online come to create a junkie-itch in their audiences. Rage becomes a need and a want. There are so many for whom this engine of corrosion is a financial boon. People have their anger because it is profitable to a particular industry. I wish there was more that bystanders could do to help their family and friends. Because the outrage and malice out there points ever more strongly toward growing division, decay, violence, and conflagration.
As a possible antidote, I offer the poignant observations by Carl Sagan as relayed in the video below, penned long before there was such a thing as Twitter. The context for his words is described on Wikipedia:
Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of planet Earth taken on February 14, 1990, by the Voyager 1 space probe from a record distance of about 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles)…
In the photograph, Earth’s apparent size is less than a pixel; the planet appears as a tiny dot against the vastness of space, among bands of sunlight reflected by the camera…
Voyager 1, which had completed its primary mission and was leaving the Solar System, was commanded by NASA to turn its camera around and take one last photograph of Earth across a great expanse of space, at the request of astronomer and author Carl Sagan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Blue_Dot
Original Image:
Justifiable Belief
May 9, 2021 by 10 Comments
It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.
~ William Kingdon Clifford, 1877
Taking Easter Seriously, an Infographic
March 28, 2021 by 8 Comments
It is that time of year again, and so I am reposting the popular “Taking Easter Seriously” infographic.
Many Christians read the Easter stories year upon year, as I did for several decades, yet we never compare them in detail. As a consequence, we often do not realize that they are not telling the same story. There are indeed contradictions in the texts, but it is very important to move beyond “mere contradiction” — the issues with the gospels are far more extensive than that. Comparison against the historical record and assessing the gospels for trends of legend development are probably far more crucial. As with many non-believers, I left Christianity specifically because of the Bible, and because I considered and examined its content very seriously indeed.
Perhaps it is time for more Christians to take the Bible and our Easter stories seriously.
[Click Image for Full Size Version (PNG), Use Ctrl+ and Ctrl- to adjust zoom.] or [PDF Version ] or [Greek Version]
I am indebted to scholars like Bart Ehrman, Marcus Borg, Richard Carrier, and many others, without whom I would no doubt continue in my own past failures to take Easter seriously. And as always, I look to improve the accuracy of my work wherever possible. Please reply with any factual errors found, and I will correct appropriately. Thanks.
Also See: Infographic for New Testament Timeline
(C) Copyright 2015, JerichoBrisance.com
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
[In other words, feel free to pass along, distribute, etc., just don’t repackage it and sell it. Thanks!]
~
References: [Read more…]
Is Science Hard on God?
February 24, 2021 by Leave a Comment
I had an long interchange with a recent visitor about climate change, and I have excerpted one part of that dialogue here (edited, enhanced, and slightly expanded for clarity). Science and math nerds: I’m taking liberties with the use of the word “proof” for accessibility reasons.
The Objection
The following basic objection was raised:
Science has spent years trying to prove the nonexistence of god. If god doesn’t exist, there is no need to try to prove he doesn’t…
My Response
There really isn’t a science journal out there dedicated to the field of disproving god. Nor does science in principle disprove the existence of anything. Science has the opposite bias. The positive claimant bears the burden of proof. If you claim the existence of a deity, the proof must come from you. Just to make sure this isn’t missed, and to underscore how baked in the burdens of proof are, consider this scenario…
You have lost your car keys. You think about where they could be. You conjure several possible explanations.
- They fell into the couch cushions.
- They are in your jacket pocket, hanging in the closet.
- They fell out in the parking lot and are on the ground by your car.
- Your neighbor took them from your counter top when he visited last.
- Aliens stole them.
Third World of Texas
February 17, 2021 by 77 Comments
I sit in the dark, in my house, where we have been isolating since March of 2020 due to the pandemic. I look out over a six inch blanket of snow, in a city that rarely sees a single inch. We are now without water and mobile phone communication. The heat has held where we are. Power has been intermittent, but better than elsewhere. We had food reserves set aside and some firewood. My old generator failed to turn over and appears to be dead. Roads are closed and traffic cannot move. Highways are lined with stalled vehicles. Stores are shuttered. Supply trucks are largely not moving. And in what has become a chronic feature of daily reality, schools have all shut down, yet again.
My son is away at college, a few hundred miles from here in a neighboring city, and they have cut off power and water in the dorms. Food appears to be running out. No one really knows when any of it will come back. We try to troubleshoot his situation over failing mobile phone connections, to help him somehow get food and water without becoming stranded.
My wife’s brother lives in our city, and after 48 hours with no heat, his indoor temperature had fallen to 26 degrees. My own brother, steeled by years of far-north driving, braved the roads in the middle of the night, crossing the city to extract him. He was dropped at a house that still had heat — but they have now lost power and are relying on what firewood remains.
We and our neighbors have been left to vigilantly scan the local news, looking for early warnings of what services may fail next. And when they might be restored. This bleak preoccupation is necessary, so that we can perform the mental calculus of contingency planning, and so we can ration what remains.
This is the city of Austin, in the third world country of Texas, USA, in the year 2021.
I am tired, just being honest. Tired of living in crisis. Tired of living in a first world country that meets every crisis with third world performance. Tired of explaining to my overseas clients why the US appears so incompetent at everything.
[Read more…]When Team Loyalty Skews Moral Logic
January 31, 2021 by 3 Comments
It is interesting to ask Americans whether they think the Boston Tea Party was a morally acceptable act. This was a polarizing question for the contemporaries of the time — Samuel Adams and Benjamin Franklin had starkly opposing views. For those who may not recall the details, the Wikipedia entry makes good reading. It was an act of high-dollar, coordinated, mob-driven vandalism, conducted by citizens dressed up like minorities/indigenous peoples. But because they were Americans (i.e., the home team), and because of their politics, many of my countrymen give this bit of anarchy a pass, and indeed hail the Tea Partiers as heroes to be emulated.
[Read more…]Hemingway on Fascism
January 9, 2021 by 1 Comment
He remains one of my favorite authors, now made a prophet.
“But are there not many fascists in your country?”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls
“There are many who do not know they are fascists but will find it out when the times comes.”
Jesus & Insurrection, and Why Some Christians Struggle with Right & Wrong
January 8, 2021 by 5 Comments
Martyr, or Insurrectionist?
I know Christian conservatives right now who cannot, at least for the moment, seem to find the right side of the Capitol riot that occurred on January 6th. One relative has posted a video lionizing the woman who was shot and killed, painting her as a martyr — an unarmed protestor, slain without cause. It is not hard to find information about the victim, or to discover what she did or why she was doing it. Her Twitter feed made her motives clear:
Less than a day before she joined the Trump loyalist protest, Babbitt, an avowed and public Trump supporter as well as a subscriber to a number of alt-right conspiracy theories, had vowed the insurrectionist movement could never be halted. “Nothing will stop us … they can try and try and try but the storm is here and it is descending upon DC in less than 24 hours … dark to light!” she wrote on Twitter.
~ The Guardian
The circumstances of her death have also been reported upon (same article):
Babbitt, 35, was reportedly shot as she and other rioters tried to break through a barricaded door in the building where Capitol police officers were armed on the other side.
A video of the incident is here.
No doubt we will find more details emerging over time, but at present, this woman does not appear to be a good candidate for sainthood. She was killed while taking part in a violent insurrection, which is the most serious of criminal acts.
[Read more…]Disavowal Day – for My Still-Trumper Friends and Family
January 7, 2021 by 38 Comments
Hopes and Fears of 2016
I have friends and family members who voted for Donald Trump in 2016. There were a range of assumptions behind their various ballot choices. Some felt he would be good for business. Others that he would gain them ground in the courts. Some believed he was brilliant, playing three-dimensional chess at a level not understood by the press or the government apparatus.
Because I spend quite a bit of time studying history, and because I listened carefully to what Trump said, I believed he had the makings and the yearnings of an autocrat. In my profession, I’ve known and worked with too many actual geniuses to arrive at the miscalibrated conclusion that Trump was even close. And I was born and raised in a household of political extremism, conspiracy theorizing, and firearms fanaticism, so I’ve never had any illusions about the cult following that was drawn to his banner.
[Read more…]Democrats Usually Win Pennsylvania, Darlings
November 12, 2020 by 2 Comments
As this bizarre election winds on unending, I do begin to wonder at people’s memory. Middle age and even older citizens act as though they never witnessed an election before. Many seem to have forgotten what calling an election actually means, and all manner of misconceptions are being attached to the phrase. They seem to have no recollection that mail ballots are not a recent invention, and that methods for securely vetting them have been with us for some time. But one of the starker blips of recall regards Pennsylvania.
Democrats usually win PA, darlings.
That phrase Blue Wall seems rather permanent, doesn’t it? It has the catchy sort of jingle that is meant to conjure immovability, steadfastness, etc. It was derived from what seemed an unwavering truth… What was it ? That Democrats always win certain states, and among them is PA. Its 30 year history:
[Read more…]Exponentials
October 23, 2020 by 2 Comments
Exponential functions are routinely underestimated, and coronavirus seems poised to instruct. She appears to have found another gear. Rather, she, like all exponential functions, does not operate based on gears at all. They grow larger based upon their current size. The larger the size, the faster the growth. There is no intrinsic upper limit. That sentence bears a second reading, because we seem not to have learned it.
The difficult part about watching this is that we actually could do something about it. It does not have to play out in this way. Most countries have done better, and some have done far better. But in America, we are experiencing a tyranny of the incompetent. The daily care exercised by many is nulled out by the indiscretions of the witless.
Growth functions like this one are conditional. Its movement reflects our decisions. The history of coronavirus in America is a measurement of collective action, not inexorable fate. Coronavirus is not an asteroid. We cannot chalk it up as a no-fault collision. Rather, this is the tale of a soccer team repeatedly kicking the ball into their own goal.
Jericho Brisance 