I might be able to brush off that clunky, ridiculous sermon as a trifle if not for the credulous congregation. That so many people are persuaded by these “arguments”—or at least dissuaded from further reasoning—is depressing. We have come so far in the last two thousand years, in our ability to amass reliable knowledge about the world, and to form stable political organizations. But there are the Christians, in the same place as always, satisfied to believe their story because it makes no sense, deluding themselves that deadening their ability to think makes the world a more hopeful place. To the contrary, their ritualistically disabled reasoning is one of the most dreadfully tragic things I have ever seen.

A world where death is real is one where life vibrates with intensity across a wide physical and emotional spectrum. Closing your eyes to that reality and counting on a later resurrection—as the pastor at Northwest urged this morning—will only anesthetize you from truly living and demean those around you who strive each day to live great lives. The “victory over death” that these Christians claim to see in their Easter story comes at the cost of ignoring what they have, and making themselves into perpetual clods, unskilled at living, and embarrassingly poor thinkers. The real triumph is in knowing that we are only matter contemplating itself and finding that everything we love and are and care about is therefore more vivid and valuable, not less.

Because human decisions and behavior are the result of ethics, values and emotion, and because sustainability directly involves our values and ethical concerns, science alone is insufficient to make decisions about sustainability, said Thomas Dietz, assistant vice president for environmental research at Michigan State University.

Information plays a much smaller role than we like to think, Dietz explained. In order to truly address big issues like climate change or sustainability, we need to talk at a society-wide scale about our values and reach mutual understanding about the values needed for sustainability.

That “talk at a society-wide scale about our values”—at least the “talk” part—is not necessarily something that religion has done well; but maintaining a strong, cultural sense of core values across a diverse population is something religion has done quite well. This is where pounding away at things with a big atheistic hammer will lead to dangerous distortions. One of the great evils of religion is the way it tends to set values through power structures that are controlled by elites. It is an exceedingly difficult project to emerge from that style of society, which has the momentum of thousands of years, and cultivate one where people “talk at a society-wide scale,” so that values are built not just by consensus about policy but in policies informed by the current state of human knowledge, and without transforming scientists into a new, value-commanding elite. Could it be that we are just not smart enough to do that?

But Myers didn’t bother to quote from (or read?) de Botton’s next paragraph, so enraged and “officially disgusted” he was with the first one. There de Botton continues:

To my mind, of course, no part of religion is true in the sense of being God-given. It seems clear that there is no holy ghost, spirit, geist or divine emanation. The real issue is not whether God exists or not, but where one takes the argument to if one concludes he doesn’t. I believe it must be possible to remain a committed atheist and nevertheless to find religions sporadically useful, interesting and consoling—and be curious as to the possibilities of importing certain of their ideas and practices into the secular realm.

That doesn’t read at all like “truth is irrelevant” to de Botton; it reads instead like he’s approaching religion as a vast complex of important social and cultural phenomena, not as a potential source for factual information about the universe. As he says quite clearly, none of the supernatural stuff is real. Done, case closed.

In fairness, de Botton briefly slips over the edge after that: “In a world beset by fundamentalists of believing and secular varieties, it must be possible to balance a rejection of religious faith with a selective reverence for religious rituals and concepts.”

That part is ridiculous, as written. But maybe de Botton just screwed up with the word “reverence.” Maybe what he means to say is that “it must be possible to balance a rejection of religious faith with a rational appreciation for the long persistence of religious rituals and concepts.” Because that must be possible. As I have said before, “if the world really is an open book for scientific investigation, if the universe really does have no intrinsic purpose, and if there are no indications from methodologically sound observations that any ‘apocalyptic messiahs’ exist, then understanding why anyone would really have such beliefs ought to be a question of great interest.”

Indeed, for many of us, whether religion is true is a pretty boring question in comparison to the problem of why religion persists despite the failure of its truth claims. And when people like P.Z. Myers get all red-faced about that perspective, their steadfast focus on doing nothing more than rebutting those truth claims reinforces the possibility of an actual dispute about whether any particular god created the universe, or whether Jesus really was the incarnation of the Hebrew creator-god, and so on. But is there, really? For atheists, especially the ones fresh out of religion, sure, walk yourself through those problems, familiarize yourself with evidence and critical thinking and modes of rational argument. But that’s like students doing word problems from the mathematics textbook—you’re just honing your basic ability to think. Those aren’t the real problems you find out in the world. If you want a challenge, work on figuring out why so many people believe the truth claims of the various religions. Better yet, study history and anthropology and biology and everything else you can get your hands on to figure out why religion exists in the first place.

That does not mean you should have “selective reverence for religious rituals and concepts”; it means you should appreciate the weight of history and the tendency of people to avoid revolutionary worldview shifts. If you believe the universe is open to study, then you must agree there is a reason why so many functional atheists still identify themselves as members of theistic religions. And if you understand that people are not always fully aware of what they think or why, then you must also agree that the reason why people cling to their religion may not be accessible through conversation, rationalization, and telling them for the eighty-seventh time that creation ex nihilo makes no sense and the Big Bang is not evidence of their particular god. At least for some people. Maybe for a lot of people. And maybe that’s why the percentage of people who identify strongly as atheists is so small—maybe they’re the only ones those approaches work on.

Building a healthy society with a robust and accountable polity where superstitions and theistic religions are shed takes more than just thinking clearly and skeptically, knowing how to spot logical fallacies, understanding the difference between correlation and causation, and so on. Those things are just not sufficient to help ordinary people live together peacefully, make collective decisions about policy, or control the balance of power between various citizens and classes of citizens. They will certainly promote more productive debates, and help ensure that policy decisions are not made in ignorance of strong knowledge gained from scientific investigation. But promoting moral norms and ethical habits—like understanding the benefits of the rule of law and the privileges and duties of citizenship, having rational and mutually acceptable criteria for conferring rights on others, and integrating each other into local communities—requires understanding that while there are truths about the universe that we are capable of knowing, and while people do have the ability to think skeptically and rationally in pursuit of those truths, we still carry with us all of the limitations “baked in” during our evolutionary history as a species. We are still affected with cognitive biases and emotional attachments and a tendency to anthropomorphize and autonomic nervous systems that only care about self-preservation and reproduction. And we should be able to recognize that many features of religion play easily with those limitations, whether purporting to confirm those cognitive biases and promoting that anthropomorphism for ordinary people, or providing a path to personal power and satisfaction of self-preservation for elites. Overcoming those deeply rooted structures of human society takes a lot more than just repeating the same arguments about logic and science.

And that, I think, is what de Botton was getting at here:

We can then recognize that we invented religions to serve two central needs which continue to this day and which secular society has not been able to solve with any particular skill: firstly, the need to live together in communities in harmony, despite our deeply rooted selfish and violent impulses. And secondly, the need to cope with terrifying degrees of pain which arise from our vulnerability to professional failure, to troubled relationships, to the death of loved ones and to our decay and demise.

God may be dead, but the urgent issues which impelled us to make him up still stir and demand resolutions which do not go away when we have been nudged to perceive some scientific inaccuracies in the tale of the seven loaves and fishes.

The error of modern atheism has been to overlook how many sides of the faiths remain relevant even after their central tenets have been dismissed. Once we cease to feel that we must either prostrate ourselves before them or denigrate them, we are free to discover religions as a repository of occasionally ingenious concepts with which we can try to assuage a few of the most persistent and unattended ills of secular life.

That is why I think de Botton just misspoke when he used the word “reverence” earlier in the piece. He didn’t really mean “reverence” in the sense of unconditional veneration or obeisance, the way a religious practitioner may have reverence for some element in his or her practice, be it a temple, an icon, a teacher, or something else; he appears to have meant “reverence” in the sense of careful regard. He’s not bowing down to religion; he’s recognizing that religion, whether we like it or not, is a massive juggernaut of human culture that will not be shoved aside with mere appeals to science and logic. Why people like P.Z. Myers are so incensed by this observation, which seems fairly basic, is puzzling. My allegiance is not to some ideologically pure “atheism,” but to the human society, with all its faults, in which I find myself, and without which my life would be impossible. And religion, while it may be one of the faults of human society, is not just an error in calculation that is easily rolled back with a correction; it is a fundamental part of how our society is constituted. That does not mean its truth claims deserve deference simply for having arisen from institutions that pre-existed their challengers, the way many religious practitioners believe, but it does mean that challengers should not underestimate the social structure of religion. The challenges of people like P.Z. Myers are a bit like coppicing, where you cut the tree down to a stump without going after the roots; new stems will just grow back. Which is probably why those atheist challengers of religion are so exasperated that they have to keep repeating themselves, while their religious targets are so exasperated with being continually cut down.

This piece is more relevant than ever.

In United States v. Jones, which came down yesterday, Alito wrote a concurring opinion to criticize the majority for using “18th-century tort law” to decide whether “a 21st-century surveillance technique” (attaching a GPS tracking device to the underbody of a suspect’s vehicle) is a “search” for Fourth Amendment purposes.

“[I]t is impossible to think of late 18th-century situations that are analogous to what took place in this case,” Alito objected. “Is it possible to imagine a case in which a constable secreted himself somewhere in a coach and remained there for a period of time in order to monitor the movements of the coach’s owner?”

Justice Scalia, writing for the majority, responds in footnote:

Justice Alito’s concurrence doubts the wisdom of our approach . . . . But in fact it posits a situation that is not far afield—a constable’s concealing himself in the target’s coach in order to track its movements. There is no doubt that the information gained by that trespassory activity would be the product of an unlawful search—whether that information consisted of the conversations occurring in the coach, or of the destinations to which the coach traveled.

But Justice Alito is ready with his own footnote:

The Court suggests that something like this might have occurred in 1791 [when the Fourth Amendment was ratified], but this would have required either a gigantic coach, a very tiny constable, or both—not to mention a constable with incredible fortitude and patience.

Oh, snap!

Anyway, somebody call the MythBusters! They need to find some coaches from 1791 and see if Tory Belleci (you know it would be him) can secrete himself in one and remain there for a period of time, undetected by owner and occupants.

Update: I decided to submit it to the MythBusters forum myself.

Not likely:

Revelation, reason, and an assurance beyond the senses tell us that the Author of our being exists, and that He is omniscient; and man and the state are creations of God’s beneficence. This Christian orthodoxy is the kernel of [Edmund] Burke’s philosophy. God’s purpose among men is revealed through the unrolling of history. How are we to know God’s mind and will? Through the prejudices and traditions which millennia of human experience with divine means and judgments have implanted in the mind of the species. And what is our purpose in this world? Not to indulge our appetites, but to render obedience to divine ordinance.

. . .

The Age of Reason, Burke protested with all his splendor of rhetoric, was in reality an Age of Ignorance. If (as most men, since the beginning of human history, have believed) the foundation of human welfare is divine providence, then the limitation of politics and ethics to a puny “reason” is an act of folly, the refuge of a ridiculous presumption.

. . .

A man always desperately busy, lacking time to chop logic, [Burke] shared Dr. [Samuel] Johnson’s exasperation at haggling over intuitive truths—the conviction of instinctive knowledge which provoked Johnson to growl, “Why, sir, we know the will is free and there’s an end of it!” Only the restless, shallow, self-intoxicated atheist, who refuses to admit the existence of anything greater than himself, really can have the impudence to deny these sources of religious insight.

(Kirk, 7th edition, pages 29–33.) All of which is to say, apparently, that the foundation of the conservative outlook rests on intuition and revelation of “divine providence,” which cannot possibly be questioned. And why not? Because “most men, since the beginning of history,” have not questioned it. Kirk’s paean to Burke and his “splendor of rhetoric” and his insistence on the disallowance of skepticism betray the shallowness of his own thought, which, if it cannot withstand the searching of a skeptic must be indefensible when held out in the daylight.

Despite the existence of a label, there has never really been an “Age of Reason” as Burke and Kirk imagine it; there has only been a flowering of doubt and skepticism, whose true character is apparently beyond the ken of of the ignorant Kirk and his credulous ilk. Doubt and skepticism—which yes, can lead to atheism—do not assert “I know” but ask “How do you?” And that question comes not from restlessness, shallowness, or self-intoxication any more than it rests on an assumption that there is nothing greater than the asker. To the contrary, it challenges the fundamental principle upon which Kirk’s entire outlook rests: the idea that knowledge can come from intuition or revelation. Thus the root of skepticism is the idea that knowledge, to be knowledge, should be explainable; or, at the very least, a person who claims know something should have a modicum of consideration for the humanity of others, whose separate minds may reasonably wonder otherwise. If Burke, Dr. Johnson, Kirk, and their modern acolytes are too enraptured with their intuitions of “divine providence” to be bothered with even trying to explain the source of their knowledge, if they are so enamored of their epistemology that they would scorn the skeptical questioner as shallow, self-absorbed, and impudent for merely bothering to ask, then calling them “hypocrites” would surely be a waste of breath; they obviously have no idea what the word might mean.

If skepticism is a “limitation of politics and ethics” to anything, it is to consciousness and legibility, something that people can actually talk about. Burke and Kirk want their politics and ethics to be rooted in unspoken, unchallengeable assumptions dressed up in the alleged beliefs of “most men, since the beginning of human history.” On that phrase, I imagine a bevy of middle-aged white men sequestered in a mahogany-paneled salon, so sure of themselves that none would even dare to point out exactly what they held in common. This is the arrogant, culturally-conditioned worldview par excellence, which remains so thoroughly unexamined because one of its fundamental precepts is that examining fundamental precepts is a cardinal sin. Everything is sublimated, locked away, veiled in mystery, and defended from skepticism with no more than self-righteous rage at the skeptic for daring to exist. The skeptic says, “If you claim to know, then explain”; the true believer replies, “If you seek explanation, you cannot possibly know.” There are no secrets; there is no moment when all is revealed to those who join the club. As Kirk admits, “[t]his view of the nature of things may appear delusory to the utilitarian and the positivist; it will seem transcendently true to the religious man.” (Page 29.) And there his explanation ends. No one knows why it seems “transcendently true to the religious man,” except that for him the gatekeeping response to the skeptic is revealed as the unitary core of the entire system: “If you seek explanation, you cannot possibly know.” There is nothing more beyond that fortified gate; that is the revelation when you join the club. The conservatism of Burke and Kirk is built on what must remain unconscious and illegible because that is its full extent. There is no object to “seem transcendently true” because the seeming is all they need. And it is all they have.

A great book of ideas throws open the doors and allows the cold wind of reality to rattle the reader. But I am barely a few tens of pages into The Conservative Mind and already the thing feels deadening and claustrophobic. It reads like a walled garden of ideological topiary, where thoughts are trimmed into neat but unnatural shapes. This hedge maze is the stuff that moves intellectual conservatives? Give me the wilderness any day.

If I manage to read more, I might post more. Maybe the later chapters are better.

Pastry chef Thomas Henzi at the Beverly Hilton Hotel spent six months designing a special dessert for the celebrities at the Golden Globes: a chocolate delice, almond crunch terrine, garnished with acacia honey, caramel and fresh berries and sprinkled with edible gold flakes at $135 a gram. Yes, you read that correctly.

“There is gold dust on there for the Golden Globes,” Henzi has explained, adding it will pair ideally with the Moët & Chandon Grand Vintage 2002 magnums created for the night. The meal will be served to 1,300 guests, including awards presenters Nicole Kidman, Natalie Portman and Frieda Pinto.

Responding with sensibility,

Joel Berg, of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, has spoken of the irony of giving rich people such extravagant food for free while those in need have to jump through hoops to get help, adding: “I resent that a wealthy society allows its neighbours to face hunger.”

. . .

“I don’t want to bring the rich down, I want to bring everyone else up,” he said. “However, this is an irony that the people who need it least often get free food wherever they go, but we still make it extraordinarily difficult for people to obtain government food benefits.”

Meanwhile, everybody is gearing up for Ricky Gervais’ next attack on Hollywood, as host of the Golden Globes. Remember last time?

“There are no rules,” Dick Clark Productions’ Executive Vice President of Television Barry Adelman told us earlier today. “We know what he does, and we’re just as interested to see it as you are.”

However, there’s one Golden Globe nominee who isn’t so excited for Gervais’ personal jabs and jokes…

“I just think that we have to be mindful that we’re always talking about human beings,” The Help‘s Octavia Spencer recently [said].

Right. So celebrities are human beings—who somehow deserve to be served gold dust for dessert, but cannot handle a few insults from a comedian. Tell me again why Hollywood is not throwing overwhelming support behind Mitt Romney?

“In the middle of this luxury Dionysius ordered that a shining sword, fastened from the ceiling by a horse-hair, be let down so that it hung over the neck of that fortunate man. And so he looked neither at those handsome waiters nor the wonderful silver work, nor did he stretch his hand to the table. Now the very wreaths slipped off. Finally he begged the tyrant that he should be allowed to depart because he no longer wanted to be fortunate.”—Cicero