Evangelical Christianity's Ugly Side Is Inseparable From Its Virtues

Nicholas Kristoff, in a column this past Saturday, summed up what liberals don't like about Evangelical Christianity, in the course of arguing that the negative stereotype isn't universal since there are nice evangelical Christians out there (like the late Reverend John Stott of Britain, and liberal evangelicals like Jim Wallis of Sojourners fame and Richard Cizik) who don't make headlines the way that the hellfire and brimstone, or prosperity gospel TV evangelists do.

This may be true, but his spot on summary of liberal distaste of the Evangelical Christian movement deserves restating for future reference:

In these polarized times, few words conjure as much distaste in liberal circles as “evangelical Christian.”

That’s partly because evangelicals came to be associated over the last 25 years with blowhard scolds. When the Rev. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson discussed on television whether the 9/11 attacks were God’s punishment on feminists, gays and secularists, God should have sued them for defamation.

Earlier, Mr. Falwell opined that AIDS was “God’s judgment on promiscuity.” That kind of religious smugness allowed the AIDS virus to spread and constituted a greater immorality than anything that occurred in gay bathhouses.

Partly because of such self-righteousness, the entire evangelical movement often has been pilloried among progressives as reactionary, myopic, anti-intellectual and, if anything, immoral. . . .

Centuries ago, serious religious study was extraordinarily demanding and rigorous; in contrast, anyone could declare himself a scientist and go in the business of, say, alchemy. These days, it’s the reverse. A Ph.D. in chemistry is a rigorous degree, while a preacher can explain the Bible on television without mastering Hebrew or Greek — or even showing interest in the nuances of the original texts.

Those self-appointed evangelical leaders come across as hypocrites, monetizing Jesus rather than emulating him. Some seem homophobic, and many who claim to be “pro-life” seem little concerned with human life post-uterus. Those are the preachers who won headlines and disdain.

While I am more than willing to acknowledge that there are social gospel preaching intellectuals like Stott, a British theological writer, who are simultaneously humanistic and Christian, it is inaccurate to call him an "evangelical Christian" in the sense of the term that describes the movement within American Christianity that took off in the American South during the Second Great Awakening, with its "distinctives" having only remote and cryptic connections to earlier movements in Christianity that has spread and mutated from there, as opposed to its generic meaning of someone who is a Christian and actively engages in the business of trying to convert others to the faith.

There is a case to be made that this narrow sense of Evangelical Christianity makes positive contributions to society and doesn't deserve the wholehearted distaste which Kristoff explains that the movement has worked hard to earn. But, attacking it from the point of figures like Stott, Wallis and Cizik, who are either not a part of that movement at all, even if religious people in that movement do read what they have to say at times, or who are on its fringes trying to reform it from its flaws from a position of underdog movement insurgents, is not a credible way to redeem this movement.

If one is to redeem (or at least understand the moral basis of) narrow sense Evangelical Christianity, one needs to look at the positive or at least culturally important contributions of core followers of the very same people, at that core of that movement, who generate such liberal outrage, not the critics at its fringe.

Evangelical Christianity does have upsides: their willingness to engage in prison ministries, their willingness to acknowledge that their communities are broken and need fixing, their willingness to include the poor and working class as a part of their community rather than objectifying them as outsiders, their commitment to trying to reform people, their ability to unify a Southern ethnic identity that doesn't show up on census forms in the face of a dominant Northern national elite culture, their ability to devote private sector charitable effort to addressing the problems of the Third World, and their commitment to the possibility of a hopeful future even in moments when individuals think that their lives have reached dead ends.

This movement is fundamentally reactionary, myopic, anti-intellectual and immoral. For this movement these are features, not flaws. This movement is also inherently and centrally willing to include and support those who are down on their luck if those people submit to their broader cultural agenda. The two sides of the movement's agenda are mutually reinforcing and inseparable parts of what it means to be an Evangelical Christian in the narrow sense of that term.

Their stubborn, fact-blind righteousness is part and parcel of their unwavering attitude of hopefulness and acceptance of the inevitability of divine providence. Their anti-intellectual orientation is part of what puts this religious movement in a comfort zone for those who are themselves ill educated. One can't unify a cohort of people who as a matter of core ethnic identity refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of the North's victory in the Civil War if you are aren't reactionary.

Evangelical Christianity offers a port in the storm for losers of many shades and stripes that more mainstream Christianity does not. Mainstream Christianity is more open to letting a depressing (for the core constituency of Evangelical Christianity) reality in, mainstream Christianity accepts the authority of intellectuals who necessarily have profound cultural distance from working class flocks as their leaders, and mainstream Christianity is more insistent upon the importance of not sinning in the first place relativite to the importance of never ending forgiveness without regard to culpability than the average self-identified Evangelical Christian knows how to manage. In a world of ugly people, a taboo against mirrors can seem attractive; Evangelical Christianity offers such a world.

If liberals want to make inroads into the people who make up the core of the Evangelical Christian movement, which is closely identified with, although not 100% identical to, the core of the American political conservative movement exemplified in the Tea Party movement and core of the Republican party, it will not suffice to embrace and encourage people who self-identify as Evangelical Christians but operate from outside or at the fringes of that movement.

Instead, liberals have to offer an alternative that can provide an authentic core identity and belief system that works for people who are uneducated and regularly down on their luck who need abundant forgiveness for their psychological well being because they can't figure out how to keep from sinning on a regular basis. They need an alternative that can maintain an unrelenting campaign of calling attention to the failures in their community that need fixing without raising the hackles that outside criticism does, who keep trying even though there is no source of relief in sight. They need to provide people with a worldview that can give them hope in the face of a lack of possibility. They need to offer some filter that can allow these people to make sense of a world that confuses them because they have their feet planted firmly in the past. These people have deep spiritual needs and neither mainstream Christianity nor secular philosophy are doing a good job of serving their needs.

If liberals can solve that riddle to meet those needs, or can change the world in a way so that a critical mass of people no longer need these things, Evangelical Christianity will wither away. Until then, liberals are fighting fire with paper. Every now and then it can smoother a hot spot that is getting out of control, but their own efforts to fight it also fuel the fire.

I suspect that if an alternative is found, it is as likely as not to be something other than mainstream Christianity. For example, Americanized Islam came close to leaping into that role under the leadership of Malcolm X for African-Americans. Mormons, while in many respects a part of the Evangelical Christian movement, similarly offer a different enough community and theological model to offer a genuine alternative to the traditional Evangelical Christian model, even though they do not completely break from that mold. It would likewise be unsurprising to seem some sort of innovation along these lines emerge from the non-denominational megachurch movement. Or, it could be something entirely different. But, until an alternative comes along, Evangelical Christianity, as pernicious as it is, will have staying power because it addresses needs that other movements do not for tens of millions of Americans.

READ MORE - Evangelical Christianity's Ugly Side Is Inseparable From Its Virtues

White Minority Culture and Xenophobia

One fruitful way to look at the politics of immigration, is from the perspective of a minority (or at least socio-economically subordinate), ethnically white culture in the United States that is trying to avoid dilution. This culture, which I call "Country-Western", is one that even people from this culture who make it into the ranks of the American economic elite often work hard to suppress.

Why do the people of immigrant filled New York City or Los Angeles not fear immigration, while excluding immigrants is highly salient in Alabama, where immigrant populations are scarce?

Perhaps, the answer is rooted in the inferrence that immigrants will assimilate into the dominant culture of the United States. If you are a native born member of the white middle class in New York City or Los Angeles, you can be relatively confident that immigrants are eager to assimilate into your culture. If you are a native born member of the white middle class in Alabama, you can be relatively confident that immigrants are not particularly eager to assimilate into your culture.

The drama of gay rights can been seen through the same prism. Because, "country-western" culture in the United States does not have much of a niche in which one can come out as gay, and because churches which are welcoming to people who are gay tend to have ties to the dominant rather than the "country-western" culture, acceptance of gay rights fuels a trickle of native born members of this white minority culture out of it and into the dominant American culture. It is no coincidence that states that allow gay marriage and/or civil unions are overwhelmingly Yankee or urban, and that states that take the half-step of domestic partnerships are overwhelming the Pacific States which have only a weak "country-western" cultural component, while those states where this cultural component is large tend to have state constitutional amendments prohibiting gay marriage.

This notion may even explain much of the anti-intellectualism that is rife in conservative white protestant political circles.

Thus, fear of immigration and gay rights and science may have much the same motive as the fear that Jewish parents have of intermarriage. The driving motivator may be a loss of cultural market share if immigration and gay rights are embraced. This impact, unlike the questionable economic impacts sometimes claimed in polite political debate, may help explain the persistance of these issues as high saliance issues despite an absence of tangible economic or liberty impact on people. The fear is dilution and marginalization of a white ethnic culture that is unable to absorb either.

A trickier issues is parsing what is going on in the Midwest, which is neither entirely Yankee or entirely Country-Western. Outside the highly urbanized Illinois and its neighbor Iowa, they have taken the Country-Western line on gay rights, but until recently haven't been particularly hostile to immigration. But, these states also seem to be swing states that are potentially on the brink of changing sides in the two party battle for the United States as they are depopulated or stagnant in population and the people with the strongest ties to the dominant American culture leave, while those with the strongest ties to Country-Western culture remain.

In contrast, as urban areas in the American Mountain West grow, the influence of rural areas and rural support oriented cities is declining and their political fates are increasingly aligning themselves with the compositions of the waves of migrants into their cities.

READ MORE - White Minority Culture and Xenophobia

Uganda Lets Anti-Gay Bill Die

Uganda is a country in East Africa at between mass violence torn Rwanda, Burundi, Congo, and Sudan that has itself experienced mass political violence (the best known being massacres by Ida Admin in the 1970s) in its recent history. Its purchased ties to Gaddafi have made it a pivotal in efforts to find a resolution of the situation in Libya, and it has plaed in active and mixed role in addressing regional conflicts.

Uganda is also remarkable for being a nation in Africa where the dominant political forces, sometimes violent, are the local brands of evangelical Christianity. This political wave has manifested itself in major social issue overhauls of its statutes, after long periods of legislative stagnation under less than democratic rule.

One recent wave of legislative change that received widespread praise was one of the most dramatic legislative reforms to establish women's equality and give women's rights that force of law in all of history in a given country as the direction of its constitutional court on April 4, 2007.

Another, which secured widespread international condemnation and massive popular support locally, was a virtulently anti-gay bill that has been considered by its parliament for the last eighteen months:

The Anti-Homosexuality Bill sought to impose the death penalty for a number of reasons, including being a “serial offender” of the “offense of homosexuality.” The bill also called for Ugandans to alert the government to known cases of homosexual behavior within 24 hours.

Religious leaders said they had obtained more than two million signatures in support of the measure[.] . . .

Since the bill was introduced, gay-rights advocates have gone into hiding in Uganda; a vitriolic newspaper published the names and addresses of gay men and lesbians and told readers to kill them; and one prominent activist for gay rights, David Kato, was bludgeoned to death with a hammer in his neighborhood outside Kampala.

The bill expired with Uganda's current legislative session on Friday, in a major victory for gay rights defenders and the international community. The far away legislative debate has made its way to American shores because missions of prominent American evangelical churches have been financial backers of the churches and political organizations that have been pivotal in backing the anti-gay legislation in Uganda. Pressure from gay rights activists on these churches, which often aren't known for their anti-gay stances in their U.S. activities, may be one important behind the scenes reason that the legislation has faltered in Uganda.

READ MORE - Uganda Lets Anti-Gay Bill Die

Probate Law and 9-11

Osama bin Laden is dead. Why care? Because it opens the door to probate claim litigation in his estate for 9-11 victims.

Osama bin Laden evaded civil liability for 9-11 and other terrorist attacks prior to his death because no process server could find him.

Bin Laden’s death could open the door to civil litigation targeted directly at him if new assets are uncovered, said Bill Wheeler of Mississippi’s Wheeler and Franks. The firm is pursuing a civil suit pending in Washington federal court stemming from the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa.

If an estate is discovered abroad, said Wheeler's co-counsel, James Franks, “that would be much easier than trying to get service on bin Laden [when he was alive].” But the ability to access those assets would depend on the probate laws in that country, he added.

Of course, the probate issues in these kinds of cases are non-trivial. Bin Laden was a Saudi Arabian national and at the time of his death was domiciled in Pakistan, both jurisdictions that use Islamic law as determined in Shari'ah courts to determine the inheritance rights in the estates of Muslim decedents like Bin Laden. In rem jurisdiction would also be present, under general Anglo-American and civil law principles, in jurisdictions where Osama bin Laden owned property. My understanding is that he was disinherited by his family, so none of the substantial inheritance to which he would otherwise have been entitled would be available to him or to his creditors.

Testamentary freedom is limited in the Islamic law regime, with only one-third of an individuals estate distributable to a non-designated heir, and I am not familiar with how it handles claims arising from the acts of decedents. Western legal systems typically provide some priority in an estate for spouses and children of a decedent over the claims of tort creditors. Also, it is likely that Bin Laden dedicated a significant share of his wealth to religious organizations which he controlled, rather than personally owning that wealth.

Shari'ah law does provide for the payment of "blood money" (diyah) when one causes the wrongful death of another, a remedy that parallels that of a civil suit, but there is not consensus among scholars of Islamic law over whether the 9-11 terrorist event was wrongful. Some Islamic law scholars have issued proclamations stating that the attack was wrongful under Islamic law, but Bin Laden likely had conferred with an Islamic law scholar, or had the authority as an Islamic law scholar himself, to determine that the attacks were conducted pursuant to a valid Jihad.

Not surprisingly, the Quran, which is the primary source of authority in Islamic law, is particularly sparse in resolving issues of jurisdiction, venue and collateral estoppel in a system of Shari'ah law courts that has no one central organization and was mostly not in place at the time that the Quaran was written.

Indeed, from a formal structural perspective, a large share of all the schisms and conflicting interpretations of Shari'ah within Islam that divide it into religious sects and national polities have this lack of clear canon law jurisdictional rules at their root. The problem is somewhat less acute in Shi'ite Islam, where there is or was for a long period depending on the sect, a living person to adjudicate these disputes, than for Sunni Islam, but in Shi'ite Islam, disputes over the legitimate order of succession among Imams (itself a quasi-probate issue) produced similar schisms.

READ MORE - Probate Law and 9-11

Religion and Politics Drives Spouse Selection

It may not be polite to discuss religion and politics with mere acquaintances, but these matters go to the core of our revealed preferences in our choice of a spouse.

On a scale of 0 to 1, where 1 means perfectly matched, physical traits (body shape, weight and height) only score between 0.1 and 0.2 among spouse pairs. Personality traits, such as extroversion or impulsivity, are also weak and fall within the 0 to 0.2 range. By comparison, the score for political ideology is more than 0.6, higher than any of the other measured traits except frequency of church attendance, which was just over 0.7. . . .
An important point of the paper apparently is that this correlation does not emerge through convergence over the term of a relationship. Rather, partners are strongly similar at the beginning of relationships.  

From here, via Gene Expression, both relying on Alford, Hibbing and Peter K. Hatemi, "The Politics of Mate Choice," Journal of Politics, April 2011. The sample size was 5000 married couples.

READ MORE - Religion and Politics Drives Spouse Selection

Bernstein's Mass

The CU-Boulder Opera will be performing Bernstein's Mass on Tuesday at 7:30 at Denver's Performing Arts Complex. I was part of a chorus performing it when I was a high school student in New Zealand (although I missed the actual performance due to an illness after months of practicing), I listened to Oberlin College's recording of it many times during college, and it remains one of the gems of my small personal music collection.  Background on the piece is available here.

It is a bit of an odd piece: a theater piece based on the Roman Catholic Mass written by one of the nation's leading Jewish composers of classical music.  It was composed for the September 8, 1971 opening of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. and dedicated "To the beloved memory of John F. Kennedy" at the request of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. 

It was written at a time when the nation and the Roman Catholic church were in turmoil over its values and beliefs, before the religious currents of American life that have defined the last few decades had taken hold. Evangelical Christianity hadn't assumed national prominence in American politics. Gay rights was not yet on the radar screen. The use of jazz and rock musical genres in the work preceded its widespread use in mainline Christian and Catholic religious music.  It is roughly contemporary with the composition of the Chicago Folk Service and precedes the charismatic movement's penetration beyond Pentecostal and black churches.

It addresses important themes that got sidelined in latter debates in the United States about the role of religion in our life. Bernstein's Mass, at its heart, is about a crisis of faith and belief. It addressed most centrally the issue that had already started to become dominant in Europe, the erosion of faith by secularism.

The most famous lyric in the piece is a contribution from Paul Simon:

Half the people are stoned and the other half are waiting for the next election
Half the people are drowned and the other half are swimming in the wrong direction.

It is also a profoundly personal, rather than political work, although its dona nobis pacem was political in the context of the brewing anti-Vietnam War movement afoot during the Nixon Presidency as it premiered. It talks about what faith means to real ordinary people in their daily lives. It talks about the conflicts of guilt over one's own sin and licentiousness fostered by the possibility of forgiveness. It acknowledges that even the clergy face struggles of belief. It strips away complex church doctrine to reveal a vision of faith as something simple, profound and natural, part of our humanity, with its central theme song:

Sing God a Simple Song . . . Make it up as you go along . . .  Sing like you like to sing, God loves all simple things, for God is the simplest of all.

As much with its musical choices as its libretto, it creates a cultural space in which someone can be both religiously faithful and deeply manly, so rare in the context of religious ideals that are either neutering (e.g. in the case of a celebate clergy) or a feminizing force that is at odds with a masculine archetype.

It conjures up a vision of faith that can be pious without being arrogant, that cares about the lives of the little people, that acknowledges a people adrift, that focuses on what is important in people's spiritual and emotional lives both melancholy and joyous, both fearful and glavanized to action.  It describes a faith that is about helping people to get on with their lives, rather than one focused on creating a City of God.  It is a last hurrah of a humanistic mainline way of looking at Christian faith that has greatly diminished in adherents and vitality in the decades that followed.  It offered up a vision of what believers could be that no one took up the flag to advance.

I don't know if I'll be able to attend, but the tickets aren't expensive and it is a remarkable work of music that makes you think in a way that transcends the boundaries of today's often stale and impersonal debate about the role of faith in our lives.

READ MORE - Bernstein's Mass

The Rationality Movement Manifesto

Less Wrong is a discussion forum that brands itself about promoting "Rationality" which takes a bit of defining, because this philosophy oriented discussion group with a larger agenda is using the term with a secondary meaning that capture what they are after. They are quite predisposed towards metaphysical naturalism, although this isn't necessarily one of their axiomatic beliefs, and towards a scientific, empirically driven approach to understanding the world. An excerpt from a recent post entitled, Epistle to the New York Less Wrongians" captures the sense of it:

Rationality isn't just about knowing about things like Bayes's Theorem. It's also about:

* Saying oops and changing your mind occasionally.

* Knowing that clever arguing isn't the same as looking for truth.

* Actually paying attention to what succeeds and what fails, instead of just being driven by your internal theories.

* Reserving your self-congratulations for the occasions when you actually change a policy or belief, because while not every change is an improvement, every improvement is a change.

* Self-awareness - a core rational skill, but at the same time, a caterpillar that spent all day obsessing about being a caterpillar would never become a butterfly. . . .

* Asking whether your most cherished beliefs to shout about actually control your anticipations, whether they mean anything, never mind whether their predictions are actually correct.

* Understanding that correspondence bias means that most of your enemies are not inherently evil mutants but rather people who live in a different perceived world than you do. (Albeit of course that some people are selfish bastards and a very few of them are psychopaths.)

* Being able to accept and consider advice from other people who think you're doing something stupid, without lashing out at them; and the more you show them this is true, and the more they can trust you not to be offended if they're frank with you, the better the advice you can get. (Yes, this has a failure mode where insulting other people becomes a status display. But you can also have too much politeness, and it is a traditional strength of rationalists that they sometimes tell each other the truth. Now and then I've told college students that they are emitting terrible body odors, and the reply I usually get is that they had no idea and I am the first person ever to suggest this to them.)

* Comprehending the nontechnical arguments for Aumann's Agreement Theorem well enough to realize that when two people have common knowledge of a persistent disagreement, something is wrong somewhere - not that you can necessarily do better by automatically agreeing with everyone who persistently disagrees with you; but still, knowing that ideal rational agents wouldn't just go around yelling at each other all the time.

* Knowing about scope insensitivity and diminishing marginal returns doesn't just mean that you donate charitable dollars to "existential risks that few other people are working on", instead of "The Society For Curing Rare Diseases In Cute Puppies". It means you know that eating half a chocolate brownie appears as essentially the same pleasurable memory in retrospect as eating a whole brownie, so long as the other half isn't in front of you and you don't have the unpleasant memory of exerting willpower not to eat it. (Seriously, I didn't emphasize all the practical applications of every cognitive bias in the Less Wrong sequences but there are a lot of things like that.)

* The ability to dissent from conformity; realizing the difficulty and importance of being the first to dissent.

* Knowing that to avoid pluralistic ignorance everyone should write down their opinion on a sheet of paper before hearing what everyone else thinks.

Boil it down and you get something pretty admirable. They are trying to gather people who believe that it is possible for sincerity and reality bounded civil discourse ot produce a better world, and also are committed to the notion that particating in this discourse and taking it seriously can help the participants live better lives.

The Less Wrongians are not ivory tower philosophers arguing over how many angels you can fit on a pinhead. They recognize the importance of insuring that discussions about important ideas are grounded, while also recognizing that fitting reality into a theoretical construct is an unavoidable and non-trivial exercise that needs to be done right for the rest to hold together with any rigor.

Following that methodology, another recent study notes that one important way to reduce prejudice against those who do not believe in God is for those who have that belief to come out of the closest, because the perception that many people do not believe in God reduces prejudice against them, perhaps through a "present company excluded" kind of social logic.

READ MORE - The Rationality Movement Manifesto

Policy Beliefs Can Change

When you get immersed in the toil of electoral politics, it is easy to get into the rut of assuming that politics is all about getting people who agree with you to the polls at a higher rate that the people who don't agree with you, and that people's opinions, to the extent that they are based on more than trivial amounts of information, almost never change.

But, in the longer run, that isn't true. While an individual, and even a whole geographic community's place on the political spectrum is very stable over time, in the case of communities, even over more than a century, the location of specific policy stances on that political spectrum can shift dramatically in a couple of a decades or less.

A poll from CNN this week is the latest to show a majority of Americans in favor of same-sex marriage, with 51 percent saying that marriages between gay and lesbian couples “should be recognized by the law as valid” and 47 percent opposed.

This is the fourth credible poll in the past eight months to show an outright majority of Americans in favor of gay marriage. . . Prior to last year, there had been just one survey — a Washington Post poll conducted in April 2009 — to show support for gay marriage as the plurality position, and none had shown it with a majority. . . . opponents of gay marriage almost certainly no longer constitute a majority; just one of the last nine polls has shown opposition to gay marriage above 50 percent.

From here.

In New York State, likely voters polled earlier this year supported gay marriage by a 56-37 margin. In New York City suburbs support for legalizing gay marriage is 61-33. Roman Catholics are more likely to support gay marriage than members of the population at large, notwithstanding church doctrine to the contrary.

If you told me when I started high school in small town Ohio in the mid-1980s that a majority of Americans would support gay marriage two and a half decades later, I would have thought that you were crazy. When I graduated from high school, only about 11% of those polled thought gay marriage should be legal, while about 72% oppose it. Frankly, I'm surprised that support for gay marriage back then was that high, I would have guessed that it was in the single digits, and maybe in small town Ohio it was. It is also possibly that the single pre-1994 poll's number was high and was made public at all only because it was a statistical outlier on the high end.

The AIDS epidemic had started to make most people aware that there were actually people who had intimate relationships with members of the same sex voluntarily, but even the notion that someone could actually identify as "gay" or "lesbian" in real life, as opposed to merely as an insulting and inaccurate description of someone, wasn't real clear to me at the time. I had never met anyone who had come out. I hadn't even seen or heard of anyone who had come out on TV, in a movie, on the radio, or in anything that I'd read in print. There were no organizations for gays, lesbians, transgender individuals that I was aware of in my town, and the only one that I was aware of nationally was ACT-UP. I was aware of a couple of same sex adult couples who lived together as a household, one of which involved an extended family member, but it had never occurred to me that a household like that would be anything other than platonic, and nobody in those households ever said a thing that suggested that more legal rights were necessary for them.

Since then, the trendline has been more or less steady and shows no sign of reversing. Nate Silver notes in the linked article that "If support for gay marriage were to continue accelerating as fast as it has in the past two years, supporters would outnumber opponents roughly 56-40 in the general population by November 2012." Even if the growth in support reverts to the overall trend line, there will be a pretty safe majority that favors legalizing gay marriage by then, and some states will be ahead of that trend while others will be behind it.

Popular understanding of sexual orientation and gender identification has expanded dramatically in a quarter of a century. By the time I finished high school, I learned that there were at least a few people in my community who self-identified as gay or lesbian (I would not meet anyone who had a transgender identity until after I finished college). Oberlin, where I went to college, was a mecca for gay and lesbian students, who were often active in campus politics, were deeply involved in running one of the major social events of the year on campus (the drag ball), and made it a point to be out of the closet in daily life in class and around campus. A large share of our student body came from New York City and some students personally knew people who had participated in the Stonewall Riots.

But, while college changed my views, this took much longer for the rest of the nation. More than one book has recounted what happened in the years that followed, but my point is not to illustrate how this happened. My point is to note that it did.

Even a decade ago, even among liberal minded people and many people in the gay and lesbian community, some form of civil unions seemed possible and desirable, but gay marriage seemed like a remote possibility that might never happen anywhere in anything but the distant future (where author Kate Elliott, who I whose science fiction Jaran novels I was reading in the late 1990s had put a society that had gay marriage). It was a little hard to determine at that point what gay marriage would even mean at a practical level, because not a lot of attention had been given to the question by people in a position to know the answers.

Now, there are thousands of same sex legally marriage couples in the United States and more in Europe. Colorado doesn't legally recognize same sex marriage and doesn't even have a civil unions law (one was narrowly defeated in this year's session of the Colorado General Assembly). But, it does have a lot of same sex couples who view each other as spouses, who hold themselves out to the public as spouses, who live as a household and who raise children together. They are parents of children who go to school with my children. They are teachers. They are nurses. Their families are my neighbors. Those couples are my clients in large numbers.

It has become obvious to a large share of the population through countless examples that someone can be gay or lesbian as a matter of personal identity, and that a person's sexual orientation is a stable part of who someone is as a person that someone is generally aware of to some extent, even if they may not fully understand their feelings in some social contexts or may be confused at times, for most, if not all, of their lives. (And, who doesn't, at some point in life, find their potential romantic relationships to be confusing?)

It has become clear as well that gay marriage doesn't have negative externalities. It doesn't weaken the institution of marriage for opposite sex couples. It helps many children and harms none. It imparts dignity without taking it away from anyone.

There are still plenty of people in the world who still insist that same sex loves are sinful based on epistles written by John the Gospel writer a couple of thousand years ago, and stories and laws written by Jewish priests centuries before then. But, those scripturally motivated views don't last long in the face of encounters with real life friends, neighbors and colleagues. They don't have much credibility with young people, even those who are evangelical Christians who have grown up in a world that has allowed them to see gays and lesbians and transgender individuals living ordinary (and extraordinary) lives like anyone else.

Decisions from courts and politicians, like the recent Congressional repeal of the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy in the military and the President's decision not to defend in court the part of the Defense of Marriage Act applicable to the federal government have provided the leadership that has changed the views of the majority, and willingness to hire a gay man as the White House social secretary. Once you abandon the sin theory of sexual orientation the rest flows pretty naturally, and the leadership that our nation's leaders have shown has pretty well discredited that understanding of sexual orientation.

The sin theory of sexual orientation is rapidly going the way of the equally scripturally supported and equally empirically inaccurate demon possession theory of mental illness. Despite the fact that the words in the Bible haven't changed, very few people walking the streets believe in an internalized way that mental illness is caused by demon possession, and likewise, the Biblically based defenses for the institutions of slavery are also now heart felt for only a tiny minority of American Christians.

Lots of people believe that faith healing (which the Gospels devote a great deal of time to) is possible, or at least once was possible, but very few people resort to a clergyman laying on hands as their sole means or even primary means for dealing with poor physical health.

The Pope's official position, reduced to writing ever since 1968 in "Humanae Vitae," is that using contraceptives is a sin. But:

A survey just one year later . . . found that 44% of Catholic women (who were regular churchgoers) were currently using artificial contraception. In 1974, 83% of Catholics said they disagreed with the Pope’s stance on birth control. By 1999, nearly 80 percent of Catholics believed that a person could be a good Catholic without obeying the church hierarchy’s teaching on birth control. A 2005 nationwide poll by Harris Interactive showed that 90% of Catholics supported the use of birth control. The Center of Disease Control and Prevention 2002 National Survey of Family Growth revealed that 97% of American Catholic women over age 18 have used a banned form of contraception, which is the same percentage as the general population.

The sea change in public opinion on gay rights isn't the only recent example.

While he was living, Martin Luther King, Jr., our nation's pre-eminent hero was the civil rights movement, was wary of pressing to strike down miscegenation laws and emphasized civil rights in the public sphere of work and commerce instead. Yet, in the wake of Loving v. Virginia, even prominent segregationist politicians like Strom Thurmond eventually came around to the view (and I genuinely believe that at least that far it was sincere) that miscegenation laws were wrong and that there was nothing wrong with interracial marriage. Large percentages of white, usual Republican primary voters in Mississippi still haven't come around, and we are not a nation of color blind people. But, Jim Crow era laws to enforce segregation and discriminate on the basis of race have been utterly morally discredited for the vast majority of Americans today.

We haven't reached a comfortable answer that tells us how to balance work and family in a world where both men and women are part of almost all parts of the workforce. But, almost nobody wants to return to the status quo that was in place when I was born when the percentage of women in law school student bodies was in the single digits, and there were only a handful of jobs that were open to women, especially to married women. Likewise, almost nobody advocates a return to a legal regime in which women cannot own property, bring lawsuits or enter into contracts in their own name, as was the case when the Founders wrote the United States Constitution.

Similarly, nobody is advocating that the franchise be limited to white male property owners over the age of twenty-one as it was when the Founders wrote the United States constitution. Indeed, while non-whites can no longer constitutionally be denied the right to vote based on race, women can no longer constitutionally be denied the right to vote based on gender, and eighteen to twenty year olds can no longer constitutionally be denied the right to vote based on age, laws restricting the franchise to property owners would quite possibly not violate the federal constitution, although such laws would be politically impossible to pass at the moment.

Abortion remains controversial, but popular opinion today would never support the laws struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965 that made it illegal to use "any drug, medicinal article or instrument for the purpose of preventing conception."

Support for legalizing marijuana is at about the same point that support for legalizing gay marriage was two years ago. The year that I graduated from high school, about 74% opposed that and 24% supported it. Now, about 50% oppose legalizing it, while 46% support legalizing it, and support for legalization has grown more or less steadily for the last fifteen years. According to the executive director of NORML:

Thirteen states have decriminalized marijuana, and that covers 130 million Americans. We now have fifteen states and the District of Columbia that have legal protections for qualified medical-marijuana patients, and that covers 90 to 95 million Americans.

The President has taken the position of not using federal law to punish people who use marijuana in compliance with state medical marijuana laws, and has paid essentially no price (and perhaps gains support) for taking this position.

In aspects of life where people have real experience and are affected in their daily lives, religious texts and doctrines and even community traditions are all but irrelevant to people's opinions. The previous generation's unthinkable possibilities can become the current generation's moral norms.

READ MORE - Policy Beliefs Can Change

The Population Genetic and Cultural Layers of Western Europe

Hunter-gatherer populations from before the introduction of farming and herding of domesticated plants and animals to Western Europe makes up about 15% of the Western European maternal gene pool (represented in individual with mtDNA haplogroups U5a, U5b1, V and 3H).  The finding is based upon both ancient DNA samples and mutation rate dating of mtDNA haplogroups.

This study doesn't estimate the Y-DNA contribution of European hunter-gatherer populations to the current Western European gene pool, but generally speaking, the patriline contributions of indigeneous men are similar to that of indigenous women or smaller.  Thus, probably less than 15% of the total gene pool in Western Europe is traceable to pre-Neolithic hunter-gathers.  By comparison, the non-African has 1% to 4% Neanderthal admixture. 

Thus, even though there have been anatomically modern humans in Europe for about 30,000 years, and there were Neanderthals in Europe (who co-existed with modern humans in Europe for what may have been as much as a few thousand years) for a couple of hundred thousand years or so before that, about five-sixths of the Western European gene pool is attributable to population expansions of farmers and herders into the area in the last seven thousand years or so, although some of this "Neolithic wave" of population expansion may actually have been an Epi-paleolithic population that arrived in the region a few thousand years earlier and relied on fishing for food (and perhaps cultivation of non-domesticated plants) prior to the establishment of a truly Neolithic form of food production, converted culturally to becoming farmers, and then expanded in population.

Moreover, the hunter-gather population prior to the last glacial maximum in Europe around 20,000 years ago probably retreated to Southern refugia as the ice sheet advanced, only to return as the ice sheet retreated afterwards.  There was not necessarily identity between pre-LGM and post-LGM modern human populations of Europe.  The second wave of hunter-gatherer expansion into Europe could have been heavily infused with ethnically different people from SW Asia, for example.

The cultural connections of Western Europeans to the Mesolithic ancestors are probably even more shallow than their genetic ties to them.

In all likelihood, all of the languages of the Mesolithic human hunter-gatherers of Europe are extinct.  If the Basque language is a Neolithic arrival (ca. 5,000 BCE in Iberia), and the Indo-European languages did indeed arrive in Western Europe only after this non-Indo-European substrate population had filled the region, and the Uralic languages of Northern and Eastern Europe arrived sometime after animals were domesticated in that area (probably after 6,000 BCE), then none of the extant languages of Europe can trace its origins directly to the Mesolithic peoples of Western Europe. 

Uralic language speaking people have the highest frequencies of mtDNA haplogroup types associated with Mesolithic hunter-gatherers and were among the last to adopt full fledged farming as a means of food production in Europe, so it is possible that these languages might be a remote ancestors of an Eastern branch of the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers of Europe (which culturally and ethnically would have extended well into Siberian Asia), but there is no really strong evidence to support the description of Uralic languages as indigeneous back to the Mesolithic, rather than an intrusion that replaced prior languages during a Neolithic expansion.

Also, not all of the recent arrivals to Western Europe are associated with the first wave of Neolithic expansion in Western Europe.  The first wave of Neolithic expansion in Western Europe appears to be strongly identified with the Neolithic Megalithic culture, popularly identified with Stonehenge although it appears to have origins in Portugal and to have stretched along most of the Atlantic Coast of Europe and the British Isles.  This culture appears to have evolved mostly culturally rather than through population replacement into the early Bronze Age.  Linguistically, it is common to associate with wave of expansion with a family of non-Indo-European languages that would have included the Basque language, which would have served the source of a "vasconic substrate" in Western Europe, upon which Indo-European languages of the area imposed themselves.  There is likewise no good reason to suspect that the Caucasian languages pre-date the Neolithic revolution.

This first Neolithic wave, it was followed by at least two main waves of Indo-European expansions in the late Bronze Age and Iron Age which resulted in language shift, disrupted the local culture, and probably left a distinguishable genetic trace in contemporary Western European populations.  The first wave of Indo-Europeans in Western Europe would have been Celtic or proto-Celtic and would have run its course, bringing all but a few pockets of Western Europe into the Celtic cultural sphere in the period from about 1250 BCE when Indo-Europeans first started to arrive, until about 500 BCE when they had largely asserted control even in the British Isles.

Several centuries after Celtic peoples consolidated control in Western Europe, the Romans would have arrived on the scene and conquered most of the same territory, only to lose its grip on those territories after the cultural transformation had already taken place when the Western Roman empire fell (one common date used to identify this moment is 476 CE, although the process happened in stages, rather than all at once).  Christianity largely replaced Indo-European and non-Indo-European during the late Roman Empire and centuries of evangelization of areas beyond the boundary of the former Roman Empire during the Middle Ages that followed.  Today, pagan folk culture, often incorporated into Christian rites, myths or secular rites, is all that remains, this often goes unrecognized as such, and these traces may be Indo-European rather than from the previous non-Indo-European cultural layer.  While there are some relict pagan practice among the Mari of Russia and the Alevi of Turkey and Basque folklore (none of which are Indo-European linguistically), in Western Europe, all of the remaining pagans of "neo-pagan" having reinvented the dead religion from the vestiges of earlier days that they have been able to recover. 

Iberia saw some demographic input from North Africa in the Middle Ages during its hundreds of years of Moorish occupation (on top of demographic inputs going both ways across the Straight of Gibralter dated to before the Neolithic revolution), but the populations genetic traces of the Middle Ages and early modern period in Western Europe were mostly internal to Europe (e.g. Viking invasions of coastal areas).  There were also minor diasporic Jewish and Gypsy population migrations to Western Europe in that time period. 

In Western Europe, the languages that descend from the Celtic languages are currently in a marginal position (Scotish Gaelic, Irish Gaelic and Welsh are the principal surviving Celtic languages and English is the dominant language in almost all of the areas where these languages are spoken with very few people being monolinguistic in Celtic).  The predominant Indo-European languages of Western Europe are descendants of the Latin of the Roman Empire or are part of the Indo-European Germanic language family.

This experience appears to be typical of other parts of the world in Africa and in Asia that have developed agriculture.  While population replacement of hunter-gather populations may not have been complete, the lion's share of the modern population arrives from relatively late arrivals.

READ MORE - The Population Genetic and Cultural Layers of Western Europe

Bainbridge: Jesus Hates The Welfare State

Professor Bainbridge is the leading academic apologist for director supremacy vis-a-vis shareholders in public corporations.

Lately, he has also taken another extreme position, that government assistance to the poor is unchristian and bad policy.

No person with decent human feelings can be unmoved by the plight of those who suffer. Yet, in the Parable of the Good Samaritan, Christ did not tell us to invoke the coercive power of the state to help the victim, he told us to do it ourselves. When one considers the track record of the welfare state, that advice seems well taken. It's been 17 years since Marvin Olasky published The Tragedy of American Compassion, but I see little evidence that would change his basic conclusion that the welfare state makes a mockery of compassion and, for the most part, perpetuates poverty and suffering.

Maybe we need to start requiring future law professors and economists to have more background in history than Bainbridge apparently does, because the pre-welfare state days were undeniably miserable and the claim that private giving and an end to the welfare state could end poverty or suffering is absurd. While the existing arrangements may need improvement, simply letting the poor starve and die unless private individuals feel charitable is not the solution.

READ MORE - Bainbridge: Jesus Hates The Welfare State

Interesting Studies

* A new study predicts the extinction of religion in nine countries using models similar to those to predict language extinction. (See also here on language extinction: 6% of the world's languages are spoken by 94% of the world's population. The remaining 94% of languages are spoken by only 6% of the population. 133 languages are spoken by fewer than 10 people.) "The team took census data stretching back as far as a century from countries in which the census queried religious affiliation: Australia, Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Switzerland." The key constant in their model in all of the studied countries was a best fit to a value that would lead to completely secular beliefs in the long run.

Daniel M. Abrams, Haley A. Yaple, Richard J. Wiener, "A mathematical model of social group competition with application to the growth of religious non-affiliation."

The model looks at the proportion of people who are religious, the proportion of people who are non-religious, and assumes that conversion rates in each direction are a function of the proportion of the population that belongs to that group and a constant called "u" for the perceived utility of membership in that group. This probability they put in the form: "c(x^a)(u), where c and a are constants that scale time and determine the relative importance of x and u in attracting converts, respectively." Using 85 sets of long term census data they found that the best fit to "a" was 1, that c is also succeptible to global fits, and that u varies from place to place. When they solve the equations on this basis they find:

The behavior of the model can be understood analytically for a = 1, in which case we have dx/dt=cx(1-x)(2u-1): logistic growth. An analysis of the fixed points of this equation tells us that religion will disappear if its perceived utility is less than that of non-affiliation [i.e. u is greater than 0.5], regardless of how large a fraction initially adheres to a religion. However, if a is less than but close to one, a small social group can indefinitely coexist with a large social group.

The study estimated the constant "u" from census of religion data for "(a) the autonomous Aland islands region of Finland, (b) Schwyz Canton in Switzerland, (c) Vienna Province in Austria, (d) the Netherlands. . . . Relative utilities for the religiously unaffiliated populations as determined by model . . . were u = 0:63; 0:70; 0:58; 0:56."

No estimate of the key constant was made for the United States, which is far less secular than the countries studied, but has a growing non-religious population. There is also good reason to wonder if the either or model used in the study (in which religious or non-religious were the only categories) makes sense in a nation without a tradition of an established or locally dominant religion as found in most of the studied areas.

The general empirical trend in the study of American religious affiliation has been a candle burning at both ends result, with both more demanding religious faiths and secular beliefs growing at the expensive of mainline moderate religious belief. Similarly, in Latin America, the trend has been to see a growth in both Pentacostal faiths and secularism at the expensive the Roman Catholicism which is the dominant established church. In sub-Saharan Africa, the trend has been for conversion from animism to Christianity, with a minor growth factor (partially demic and partially from conversion) for Islam, while secular views have not been particularly notable as a share of the population.

Put another way, there is a lot to be said for a logistic model to explain trendlines in religious affiliation, but the model does nothing to explain what drives changes in the key constant "u" that drives these trends. By analogy, is is compable to looking at politics at an electoral level without really examining the movement politics that cause political views to change in the general population over time.

This model is a good antidote, however, to purely population genetic models that start from the assumption that children will share the faith of their parents, rather than attempting to quantify propensities to convert from one faith to another in a meaningful fashion. To some extent, by deriving empirical constants in the model from data, it glosses over these theoretical objections in a robust way. The constant "u" effectively subsumes both conversion propensities and reproduction rates. But, near the extremes, it becomes more and more important to recognize the relevance of subgroup membership, subgroup coherence, and reproduction rates, although its constant "a" can help mediate that result.

For example, in the sample "a" equals 1 model, it can't explain the persistence, and even growth, of faiths that Judaism and the Amish, in the face over overwhelming minority status for thousands of years and hundreds of years respectively. More generally, a more realistic model would assume a hetrogeneous propensity to convert which might very well have a hereditary component (due to psychological tendencies to take certain approaches to tradition and authority selected for heavily through religious endogamy when a religion is in the minority).

In more complex models, some religious populations and some personality types might be slow to convert, while others might convert more rapidly, and if the populations slow to convert also have more children and have children younger, you might end up with a bimodal outcome with a stable, fertile religious segment and a stable less fertile non-religious segment. It isn't hard to imagine the United States and Latin America evolving into this kind of equalibrium. And, while Turkey is nominally 99% Muslim, its division into different varieties of Islam arguably reflects this kind of balance.

* In a decidely participant-ethnographic investigation, New York City dezinens have discovered that godless people who get together in clubs are happier.

* A parasitic factor in mental illness may have been located:

Toxoplasma gondii infects approximately 25 percent of the human population. The protozoan parasite is noted for altering the behavior of infected hosts. . . .

"It is noteworthy that we found vasoactive intestinal peptide receptor 2 (VIPR2) was upregulated by all three Toxoplasma strains," says Xiao. VIPR2 "is linked to schizophrenia in some recent publications. Since the tropism of Toxoplasma for brain has been linked with specific behavioral changes and psychosis in humans, this finding will have some fundamental significance for understanding the correlation between Toxoplasma and psychosis."

The report based on the study by J. Xiao, L. Jones-Brando, C. C. Talbot, R. H. Yolken. "Differential Effects of Three Canonical Toxoplasma Strains on Gene Expression in Human Neuroepithelial Cells." Infection and Immunity, 2010; 79 (3): 1363 DOI: 10.1128/IAI.00947-10 suggests from a mouse model that there may be an important subclass of mental health conditions with a parasitic infectious agent as a cause or trigger.

* There may be a quick and easy vaccine cure for a complication of dust mite allergies:

Monash University researchers are working on a vaccine that could completely cure asthma brought on by house dust mite allergies. If successful, the vaccine would have the potential to cure sufferers in two to three doses. . . . Professor O'Hehir has also made significant gains in developing a vaccine for people with peanut allergies. Currently there is no specific treatment for peanut allergy with avoidance and emergency treatment of anaphylaxis with adrenaline as the only options. Allergen immunotherapy is available for selected patients with house dust mite allergy but typically injections need to be given regularly for three to five years.

I've never been diagnosed with asthma, but do have a dust mite allergy and have had subclinical asthma-like symptoms, so this is naturally of great interest to me.

* Native Americans had big influences on the environment of the Americas beyond a megafauna extinction, in the Everglades:

Tree islands are patches of relatively high and dry ground that dot the marshes of the Everglades. Typically a meter (3.3 feet) or so high, many of them are elevated enough to allow trees to grow. They provide a nesting site for alligators and a refuge for birds, panthers, and other wildlife.

Scientists have thought for many years that the so-called fixed tree islands (a larger type of tree island frequently found in the Everglades' main channel, Shark River Slough) developed on protrusions from the rocky layer of a mineral called carbonate that sits beneath the marsh. Now, new research indicates that the real trigger for island development might have been middens, or trash piles left behind from human settlements that date to about 5,000 years ago.

These middens, a mixture of bones, food discards, charcoal, and human artifacts (such as clay pots and shell tools), would have provided an elevated area, drier than the surrounding marsh, allowing trees and other vegetation to grow. Bones also leaked phosphorus, a nutrient for plants that is otherwise scarce in the Everglades.

And, in the Eastern United States where "prehistoric people decreased forest cover to reorient their settlements and intensify corn production. They also contributed to increased sedimentation in valley bottoms about 700 to 1,000 years ago, much earlier than previously thought. The findings suggest that prehistoric land use was the initial cause of increased sedimentation in the valley bottoms, and sedimentation was later amplified by wetter and stormier conditions."

* Unimpressive social science discovery of the week: Subjects in psychology experiments distinguish between real human beings and mere video recordings of human beings.

* Traits that cause organisms to disperse rapidly in space lead to selective evolution without regard to other measures of biological fitness.

* We know more about the apes of Europe and Asia tens of millions of years ago than we used to know:

Extant apes (Primates: Hominoidea) are the relics of a group that was much more diverse in the past. They originated in Africa around the Oligocene/Miocene boundary, but by the beginning of the Middle Miocene they expanded their range into Eurasia, where they experienced a far-reaching evolutionary radiation. . . Here we provide an updated chronology that incorporates recently discovered Iberian taxa and further reevaluates the age of many previously known sites on the basis of local biostratigraphic scales and magnetostratigraphic data. Our results show that identifiable Eurasian kenyapithecins (Griphopithecus and Kenyapithecus) are much younger than previously thought (ca. 14 Ma instead of 16 Ma), which casts serious doubts on the attribution of the hominoid tooth from Engelswies (16.3–16.5 Ma) to cf. Griphopithecus.

READ MORE - Interesting Studies

Defining God

Sean Carroll at Cosmic Variance, in an essay entitled "Does the Universe Need God?", highlights a definition of God and picks at it:

[T]he God hypothesis seems simple and precise – an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent being. (There are other definitions, but they are usually comparably terse.)

In the comments, I suggest an alternative definition, and restate (with edits and some expansion) here:

Definitionally, a definition of God as "an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent being" while traditional (was it Aquinas that made it a standard?), isn't a very good operational definition of how we separate religious and non-religious thinking. It is a poor fit to polythesism, animism, or many Eastern religious concepts like Tao and Kharma.

More useful as an operational definition of that which is divine would be "some being or power that acts with moral purpose or an agenda for human events, in the lives of humans, that is not human, a human creation, or an ordinary animal." One can worry the "ordinary" part of animal a bit, but the notion is to exclude the moral acts of gorillas and dolphins and dogs and cats and the like, without necessarily ruling out the like of angels, demons, jinn, ghosts, Gaia, and so on. Charlotte of Charlotte's Web is perhaps a gray area in this definition -- she being no ordinary spider.

Under this operational definition, the deist conception of a Newtonian clockmaker God, reimagined as something setting the Big Bang in motion and fixing the laws of nature, without more, would not constitute God, even if it were done by some gray haired titan surrounded by an Army of angels. This operational definition also excludes a truly pure version of a scorekeeper God, one who rewards and punishes us solely in the afterlife, but unlike the Abrahamic Gods, does not tell anyone what the rules by which God keeps score happen to be.

On the other hand, it would include the Star Wars saga's mitcholorians, or some supernatural ancient astronauts who brought humanity to a next stage of consciousness and influenced our evolution, even if these being themselves have an evolutionary history of their own (a la Arthus C. Clark's "2001"). It also permits gods of less than infinite power who are not "omnipotent" or "omniscient" (such as the Greek pantheon, and even the Judeo-Christian God in Genesis who sometimes lacks knowledge of what the humans are up to until he pays attention and discovers their acts), cruel gods who are not "omnibenevolent" (e.g. Satan or the Zoroastrian force of evil), or divine forces who seek balance rather than good (e.g. Taoist conceptions of the divine), or minor divinities like fairies, who may be neither actively good nor bad, but simply like to screw with us to see what happens (a bit like the relationship of scientists and lab rats from the rat's persecptive).

Gods that people care about, fear, love and worship, the kind that act with moral purpose or an agenda for human events of their own, might very well be entirely separate and unrelated to gods that establish laws of the universe. They also give a very real meaning to the notion of playing God, either by changing the ammoral course of nature, or by intervening in human affairs of people in general from some position of power with some sort of agenda in ways that change their lives.

Under this conception of God, we can reason directly that none of the known inviolate laws of nature have any apparent moral purpose or agenda for human events, at least on their face. They may, as an anthropomorphic principle does, include a purpose that makes it possible for human beings to exist, but the have no preference for good or evil or anything else we do in human affairs; they are nihilist.

Thus, for this conception of the divine, we must assume that God is a "god of the gaps" who is very shy and acts only through an exquisitely balanced manipulation of random quantum events, and that such a god would be particularly invisible in quantum events measured in laboratories or observations of distant stars, because in such events outcomes have no moral purpose or agenda for human events for God to implement. This kind of divinity looks more like a morally purposive fate ("cruel fate"), like kharma, like a luck in a sense that has favorites rather than being truly random.

READ MORE - Defining God

Disaggregating Islam

As the map above illustrates (a somewhat different map that seeks to portray the same data is found here and at odds, for example, on the prevailing Islamic religious tendencies in Sudan), Islam is not monolithic, just as Christianity is not.

The way that Sunni Islam is practiced in Libya is not the same as the way it is practiced in Saudi Arabia, Somalia or Afghanistan, each of which have distinctive elements. The groupings shown above are sometimes called "madhhab" (schools of "jurisprudence," called untranslated "Fiqh") by Muslims. Shi'ite Islam can likewise be disaggregated into distinct branches, and there are other divisions as well.

A Brief Taxonomy Of Islamic Religious Group Divisions

The madhhab shown above in Sunni Islam are the Hanafi, Hanbali, Maliki, and Shafi'i. The branches of Shi'ite Islam shown are the Ismaili, Ja'fari, and the Zaidi. The Ibadi movement in Islam is not strictly Sunni or Shi'ite.

As a first approximation, it may be easiest to describe the madhhab with geolocators.

The Hanafi Sunni Islamic madhhab is the predominant form of Sunni Islam in South Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East (north of Saudi Arabia) and Egypt. It is the largest school of Sunni Islamic jurisprudence.

One of the more important movements, mostly within the Hanafi school, is the Barelvi movement of South Asia:

The Barelvi movement was started in 1880 to defend contemporary traditionalist Islamic beliefs and practices from the criticisms of reformist movements like the Ahl al-ḥadīth (people of hadith). This included a defence of many traditional practices and rites associated with popular Sufism. . . . To its followers the movement is known as Ahle Sunnat wal Jama'at ("People of the traditions of Muhammad and the broad community"), as a means to lay exclusive claim to be the legitimate form of Sunni Islam, in opposition to its reformist rivals like the Deobandi, Ahl al-ḥadīth and Darul-uloom Nadwatul Ulama movements. . . . India Today estimates that the vast majority of Muslims in India adhere to the Barelvi movement, and The Times (UK) writes that a majority of (South Asian) Muslims in the United Kingdom adhere to the movement as well. Similarly, the conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation gives such estimates for the vast majority of Sunni Muslims in Pakistan. . . . The Barelvi movement has taken a stance against Taliban movements in South Asia, organising rallies and protests in India and Pakistan, condemning what they perceive as unjustified sectarian violence.[18] The Sunni United Council (SUC), an amalgamation of eight Sunni organizations, launched the Save Pakistan Movement to stem the process of Talibanisation. Terming the Taliban a product of global anti-Islam conspiracies, the leaders of SUC charged it with playing into the hands of the United States to divide Muslims and bring a bad name to Islam.

The founder of the Barelvi movement "issued fatāwā of apostasy against the founders of the Deobandi, Wahhabism, Shi'i and "Qadiani" (Ahmadiyya) sects of Islam. . . . "Not only did [he] obtain confirmatory signatures from other scholars in the subcontinent, he managed to get agreement from a number of prominent ulama in Mecca. That occurred in the first years of the twentieth century—long before the Al-Saud and their Wahhabi allies got control of the Haramayn. The feat was, nevertheless, stunning. The antipathy of the Deobandis toward the Ahl-i Sunnah on the emotional level becomes more comprehensible when Ahmad Riza's fatwa receives a full explication."

The Barelvi movement's beliefs concerning Muhammad the Prophet's nature parallel those of gnostic Christian views about Christ that emphasize his spiritual being and divinity, rather than his humanity. The fatwa issued by its founder would be on a par with saying that the Pope isn't really a Christian, and might be compared to Martin Luther's posting of his Ninety-five Theses that kicked off the Reformation in Europe.

At the other extreme within the Hanafi school of Islamic jurisprudence is the Deobandi movement:

The movement began at Darul Uloom Deoband (a madrasah) in Deoband, India, where its foundation was laid on 30 May 1866. . . . The Deobandi movement gained significant traction in the early 1900s, mainly due to the activities of its graduates. They, in many instances, played a key role in establishing similar institutions in other parts of the Indian subcontinent. Deobandis are considered to be within the confines of Sunni Islam (Ahl as-Sunnah wa’l-Jamā‘ah). They follow the Ash'ari and Maturidi schools of aqidah (creed). In fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) they primarily follow the Hanafi school of law while they accept the validity of the remaining three schools of Sunni Islam, namely the Shafi`i, Maliki and the Hanbali schools. In the spiritual science of Tasawwuf (Sufism) they follow the Chishti, Naqshbandi, Qadiri and Suhrawardi orders. Since the 1920s the Deobandi apolitical stance has taken shape in the transnational movement Tablighi Jamaat, but Islamist trends such as those of Pakistan's Jamiatul Ulama-i Islam have also emerged from the ranks of the Deobandis. Deobandi thought, which originated in a north Indian town, has thus reached many countries, such as Pakistan, South Africa and the United Kingdom. According to The Times, about 600 of Britain's nearly 1,400 mosques are run by Deobandi affiliated scholars, and 17 of the country's 26 Islamic seminaries follow Deobandi teachings, producing 80% of all domestically trained Muslim clerics. . . . Deoband has been criticized for a failure to reconcile Islam with modern values. One particular topic which has sparked criticism are fatwas issued by Deobandi clerics regarding the behavior of women in the political and economic spheres. For example, in August, 2005, Deobondi clerics from Darul, Uloom, a Deoband seminary, issued a fatwa stating that while Muslim women may contest political elections, they must observe purdah while doing so. In May 2010, clerics from the same seminary issued a fatwa stating men and women cannot work together in public offices unless the women are properly clothed.

The Tablighi Jamaat are, in more familiar terms, low key, dispositionally puritanical Evangelical Muslims, mostly mission oriented preachers, with a similarly loose level of organization, who go on revival tours originally "in response to Hindu revivalist movements, which were considered a threat to vulnerable and non-practicing Muslims" who favor "personal communication for proselytizing" and de-emphasize formal denominational affiliations. The discourage "social enmeshments in customary and ceremonial rituals" such as elaborate weddings. "In the 1990s and 2000s, sporadic violence resulted from disputes over control of Pakistani mosques between Barelwi and Deobandi."

The Deobandi has faced a scandal somewhat akin to the Catholic indulgences scandal of the Reformation alleging that religious fatwas were bought rather than decided in accordance with Islamic law. Their movement is also notorious as a source of inspiration for many who are involved in Islamic terrorism.

Hanabali is the Sunni Islamic madhhab predominant in Saudi Arabia, and its most distinctive pronouncement, from the view of an outsider, is that women must cover their heads, faces and hands in public. It is the most conservative of the four schools and the one that relies on Hadith the most. It is the smallest of the four major school of Sunni Islamic jurisprudence in terms of numbers of adherents.

The Maliki Sunni Islamic madhhab is associated roughly with areas where Berbers are or were found in North Africa and Southwest Europe; it is also found in the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and in some parts of Saudi Arabia. Many Maliki differences in result on Islamic law are subtle details of prayer practice; methodologically, the Maliki resort to a larger body of precedent and tradition than other schools of Islamic jurisprudence.

The Shafi'i Sunni Islamic madhhab is common in East Africa and in the vicinity of East of South Asia. It is a significant minority school of jurisprudence in South Asia, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. It is most notable for its assertion that Islamic law should not be extended by analogy or legal reasoning beyond its authoritative pronouncements and accepts a fairly narrow set of pronouncements as authoritative; thus, practices that are widely accepted in the Muslim community and not expressly contrary to the Qur'an should not be prohibited by Islamic law.

The Ibadi are most commonly associated with Oman and the island of Zanzibar in Tanzania. While it is not strictly either Sunni or Shi'ite, generally speaking, their doctrines are closer to conservative Sunni Islam, with a somewhat different narrative of the afterlife and a more strongly religiously bolstered division between members and nonmembers. But, they see Islamic leadership succession as having gone awry around the same time as the Shi'ias do (for somewhat different reasons), and share with the Shi'ia similar metaphysical beliefs regarding the creation of the Qur'an.

The branches in Shi'ia Islam reflect groups on different sides of succession disputes (and Shi'ia Islam itself broke with Sunni Islam over a succession dispute), with ideological and practice differences arising incidental to, or as a result of, those splits.

The Ja'fari branch of Shi'ite Islam (sometimes called the "Twelvers" aka Ithnā‘ashariyyah) is predominant in Iran and is the most common form of Islam for Shi'ite minorities, making up about 85% of all Shi'ite Muslims. For them, the last Iman, born in 868 CE, is a messianic figure who has not died and will return with Christ to restore all that is good to the world.

The Alevi of Turkey, are a particularly notable subset of Twelvers who make up more than a third of the population of Turkey and help to explain why Turkish Muslims are so much more liberal than, for example, Egyptian Muslims, on a wide variety of issues.

Alevis are sometimes categorized as part of Twelver Shi'a Islam, and sometimes as its own religious tradition, as it has markedly different philosophy, customs, and rituals. They have many Sufi characteristics and express belief in the Qur'an and the Shi'a Imams, but reject polygamy and accept religious traditions predating Islam, like Turkish shamanism. They are significant in East-Central Turkey. They are sometimes considered a Sufi sect, and have an untraditional form of religious leadership that is not scholarship oriented like other Sunni and Shia groups. They number around 25 million worldwide, of which 22 million are in Turkey, with the rest in the Balkans, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Azerbaijan, Iran and Syria.

The Alevi are arguably the most "liberal" of the Muslim groupings, adhering to principles including: "Humanism, love and respect for all people (“The important thing is not religion, but being a human being”), tolerance towards other religions and ethnic groups (“If you hurt another person, the ritual prayers you have done are counted as worthless”), respect for working people ("The greatest act of worship is to work”), and equality of men and women, who pray side by side."

The Zaidi branch of Shi'ite Islam (sometimes called the "Fivers") is associated with Yemen and bordering parts of Saudi Arabia, and don't recognize the legitimacy of the last seven of the Imans recognized by other Shi'ites.

The Ismaili, the second largest branch of Shi'ite Islam which takes the position that the hereditary chain of succession of Imans remains in tact from the time of the prophet to today, are most common in South Asia (and are also the branch of Islam to which the Druze have the closest historical links). The largest grouping of the Ismaili are the Nizari who see Aga Khan IV as the current successor, and the second most common are the Bohra, found in South Asia and Yemen, whose sects recognize different current non-hereditary spiritual leaders (whom they call the Da'i) due to past succession disagreements, with the predominant group of Bohra recognizing Dr Syedna Mohammed Burhanuddin as the current Da'i. The capacity of Ismaili Muslims to seek guidance from the unifying living spiritual leader of their sect is probably the most pervasive distinction between the Ismaili and other Muslims.

These broad "denominational" type divisions also fail to capture movements with Islam such as the poetic and spiritually oriented Sufi movement, which might be compared loosely to cross-denominational movements like the charismatic movement in Christianity, that are at odds with the subdued and legalistic religious orientation of other Muslims, with the movement called "Wahhabism" and "Salafism" with extends beyond particular jurisprudential schools at the other extreme:

Sufism is a mystical-ascetic form of Islam. By focusing on the more spiritual aspects of religion, Sufis strive to obtain direct experience of God by making use of "intuitive and emotional faculties" that one must be trained to use. Sufis usually considered Sufism to be complementary to orthodox Islam, however it has often been accused of being an unjustified Bid‘ah or religious innovation by the Salafi. One starts with sharia (Islamic law), the exoteric or mundane practice of Islam and then is initiated into the mystical (esoteric path of a Tariqah (Sufi Order). Some Sufi followers consider themselves as Sunni or Shi'a, while others consider themselves as simply 'Sufi' or Sufi-influenced. . . .

Salafism is in general opposed to Sufism and Shi'a Islam, which they regard as heresies. They see their role as a movement to restore Islam from what they perceive to be innovations, superstitions, deviances, heresies and idolatries.

The methodology predominates mainly in countries such as Saudi Arabia, the other Arabian Peninsula states and elsewhere. It has significant numbers of adherents in India and Pakistan where the movement is known as Ahl al-Hadith (People of Hadith). It is also growing in popularity in countries such as those in the western world; in particular the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada and in many other countries.

There are multiple different Sufi orders. This form of Islam is very prominent in Pakistan, and is common in Africa, Turkey, historically Islamic Europe (e.g. Albania and Kosovo), Central Asia and South Asia.

Relevance

Politically, the key point is that Islam is not a unified, monolithic world force that will unite against the rest of the world on any points apart from the core Islamic religious doctrines shared by all Muslims like acceptance of the Qur'an as an authoritative and inspired source of religious wisdom.

In Sunni Islam and for Twelvers in Shi'ia Islam, there is not even a living accessible figure comparable to the Pope in Roman Catholicism, or the Daili Lama in Tibetan Buddhism, who is an undisputed supreme spiritual leader unique connection to the divine.

Muslims, of course, have religious leaders in their communities, but in most schools of Islamic thought these leaders of more like Methodist peachers or Rabbis, religious trained community leaders, but nothing more than faithful human beings who have studied hard and made a commitment to devote their lives to religious life, not near divine beings. An important subset of these leaders style themselves as canon lawyers and academics, and securing an opinion from one that you are right on a point of Islam is a bit like finding an economist who agrees with you; it may mean that you have a good basis for your position, but it rarely actually implies that here is a consensus among all Muslims on that point. Other Muslim leaders, particularly in the Sufi tradition, are inspired poetic figures, the sort of person that one might describe as an Islamic Jack Kerouac, whose moving, different way of looking at and describing the world moves listeners to new understandings themselves.

For someone who is interested in making sense of the history that caused the human landscape of the world to appear as it does today, these groupings can show connections that enhance and shed light upon the groups suggested by language and population genetics. Religion is often more strongly conserved than language, and religious scripture and prayers often persist in languages that have otherwise died long ago. Population genetic patterns that match a religious grouping may be explained by the same history that helps explain the religion's geographic expanse.

Recognizing these distinctions also encourages caution when it comes to extrapolating something that seems to have an Islamic religious basis in one place to another where a different version of Islamic practice prevails.

READ MORE - Disaggregating Islam

Friday News Dump

In Colorado

* Colorado's unemployment rate in February, of 9.1%, is the highest the state has experienced since the Great Depression and above the national rate of 8.9%. The oil bust of the early 1980s brought the rate to its previous peak of 8.8%. Also, unemployment estimates for Colorado over the last couple of years turn out to have been greatly understated, since the census revealed that the population figures used in making the original unemployment predictions were too low in high unemployment areas. Colorado's record lowest unemployment, since 1976, was at the turn of the millenium when it dropped to a little under 3%.

State officials have blamed migration to Colorado and the decision of many people who have given up looking for work to return to the workforce. Still, the fact that unemployment is climbing, rather than falling, long after the "recovery" in GDP terms has been underway, is discouraging. Unemployment is alawys a lagging indicator, but the employment situation has been worse and longer lived in the current employment recession than any since the Great Depression.

* Despite an immense state budget deficit, House Republicans in Colorado are still proposing large new tax cuts, in excess of $60 million.

* Colorado's proposed state budget will include more cuts to the Fort Logan psychiatric hospital, continuing a trend of decreasing mental health hospital capacity. The current cuts would close a juvenile ward that current houses an average of a dozen inpatients. The Joint Budget Committee argues that private facilities in the state offer the same services at a lower price and can handle another dozen patients.

In Other State Legislatures

* Both houses of Wisconsin's state legislature has passed a bill ending collective bargaining for public sector workers in Wisconsin's state and local governments. Republican Governor Walker has promised to sign the bill, which he championed. Naturally, the bill received voted only from Republicans, and a few Republicans broke ranks to join with Democrats in opposing it. Protests continue in Madison, with farmers set to encicle the state capitol with tractors next. Public opinion in Wisconsin has shifted decisively away from the Republicans and towards President Obama and the public employees unions in Wisconsin as a result of the union fight. Recall efforts are underway targeting a number of legislative anti-union Republicans, although it isn't clear if these will make the ballot or have a realistic chance at succeeding. Similar efforts are making progress in other Republican controlled states.

* The Governor of Illinois signed a bill abolishing the death penalty in that state, appropriating the funds that would have been used for death penalty litigation to a trust for murder victims, and pardoned the fifteen people on death row there. Illinois is the 16th state in the United States to abolish the death penalty.

* Kentucky has joined the list of states addressing state budget shortfalls with sentencing reforms, particularly with milder sentences for non-violent drug users.

Kentucky . . . became the latest to make the shift when Gov. Steve Beshear signed into law a measure increasing spending on rehabilitation programs and intensive drug testing. The law also reduces penalties for many drug offenses and may allow some traffickers and users of smaller amounts of drugs to avoid prison.

Delaware, Florida, Indiana, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania are among those that have pending bills to reduce penalties for drug offenders, in some cases by directing defendants into treatment programs. Similar laws have taken effect in South Carolina, Colorado and New York in recent years. States have maintained stiff penalties for more-serious drug crimes.

While the changes are part of broader belt-tightening efforts, they also reflect a growing belief among state lawmakers that prosecuting drug offenders aggressively often fails to treat their underlying addiction problems and can result in offenders cycling in and out of prisons for years — a critique long voiced by groups that advocate in favor of defendants' rights. . .

The state measures mark a sharp retreat from the war on drugs, which gathered steam in the 1980s and '90s with mandatory-minimum and three-strikes prison sentences that resulted in some drug offenders being locked up for decades. Drug arrests nationwide climbed from about 580,000 in 1980 to about 1.6 million in 2009, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Although some states started rethinking drug punishment before the recession, many more states have come on board in the past two years. In 2007, Texas began shifting more drug offenders away from prison, which helped hold down the inmate population. The changes cost $241 million, less than half what the state anticipated it would have spent to build three new prisons.

* Ohio's criminal sentencing commission has released a new report on the causes of that state's prison overcrowding problem. According to the report, "recent growth in Ohio’s prison population — even with mandatory sentences and scores of bills that increase penalties for particular offenses — is not driven primarily by intake (although it is a factor). It’s largely fueled by increases in inmates’ average length-of-stay."

* Connecticut voters in a survey favored the decriminalization of marijuana (79% favor medical marijuana and 65% favor decriminalization), legalizing Sunday liquor sales (65%), and reinstating the death penalty (68% up from 59% in 2005 after a high profile murder). But, majorities there don't favor allowing grocery stores to sell wine or liquor. Connecticut currently has a death penalty but its legislature is considering repealing it.

* Connecticut last year joined a list of states that automatically treat some teens under the age of eighteen as adults in the criminal justice process; New Hampshire changed its law in 2008. Similar proposals are pending in Massachusetts, Wisconsin, and North Carolina. The only other state that automatically tries some teens under the age of eighteen as adults is New York State. Budget savings and increased sensitivity to the distinctiveness of juvenile offenders has prompted the changes. For example, a recent study found that:

[I]nmates in adult facilities (surprisingly) give better reports than youth in juvenile facilities on several measures (including criminal activity and victimization), they also fare much worse on other measures. Importantly, the inmates in adult facilities report substantially and significantly greater rates of PTSD and mental illness symptoms, and are much more likely to be afraid for their safety, compared to those in juvenile facilities.

Colorado never had a law that automatically tried older teens under the age of eighteen as adults, but did give prosecutors the authority to directly file many serious criminal charges against older juveniles as adults without court approval; that authority was recently narrowed by Colorado's General Assembly.

* California is building a new death row prison at a projected cost of $356 million, as a partial response to federal prison overcrowding litigation in the state, in which inmates have been successful on the merits, but not seen many results.

California has 713 inmates awaiting execution. . . . By comparison, Florida ranked second, with 398, and Texas was third at 337. . . About 700 condemned men are confined at San Quentin, north of San Francisco, in facilities built to hold 554, according to the Corrections Department’s website. (Nineteen women face execution and are held in Chowchilla, a prison in the Central Valley.) On average, the men are likely to spend 17 years in the aging cell blocks, according to the prison system. . . . Since 1978, when California reinstated capital punishment, 53 condemned inmates have died from natural causes while on death row. Eighteen committed suicide and 13 were executed. Six died from other causes.

Other Domestic News

* Long Island Republican Congressman King has launched hearings in the House Homeland Security Committee into the radicalization of Islam, over objections that this amounts of a McCarthyistic inquiry that is singling out a single religion that may incite further terrorist sentiment against the United States.

* In Skinner v. Switzer, the U.S. Surpeme Court found, in a narrow 6-3 decision, that a Section 1983 civil rights suit by a death row inmate (as opposed to a habeas corpus suit) was not procedurally barred by prison litigation reform statutes. The inmate challenged an interpretation of a Texas law that prevented him from securing post-conviction access to DNA evidence in his muder case that might implicate another suspect (now dead). The court ruled in his favor because DNA testing itself does not necessarily lead to the setting aside of his conviction, as it could show that he is guilty or be inconclusive (and hence is not duplicative of habeas corpus relief), and does not violate the Rooker-Feldman doctrine because while a "state-court decision is not reviewable by lower federal courts . . . a statute or rule governing the decision may be challenged in a federal action"). The ruling also provided yet another case where heightened pleading standards in federal civil litigation were held not to bar a straightforward lawsuit brought by a prisoner.

* Excessive federal child pornography laws continue to produce absurd results:

In the spring and summer of 2006, Eric Rinehart, at the time a 34-year-old police officer in the small town of Middletown, Indiana, began consensual sexual relationships with two young women, ages 16 and 17. One of the women had contacted Rinehart through his MySpace page. He had known the other one, the daughter of a man who was involved in training police officers, for most of her life. Rinehart was going through a divorce at the time. The relationships came to the attention of local authorities, and then federal authorities, when one of the girls mentioned it to a guidance counselor. Whatever you might think of Rinehart's judgment or ethics, his relationships with the girls weren't illegal. The age of consent in Indiana is 16. . . . Rinehart got into legal trouble because one of the girls mentioned to him that she had posed for sexually provocative photos for a previous boyfriend and offered to do the same for Rinehart. Rinehart lent her his camera, which she returned with the promised photos. Rinehart and both girls then took additional photos and at least one video, which he downloaded to his computer.

In 2007 Rinehart was convicted on two federal charges of producing child pornography. U.S. District Court Judge David Hamilton, who now serves on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, reluctantly sentenced Rinehart to 15 years in prison. Thanks to mandatory minimum sentences, Hamilton wrote, his hands were tied. There is no parole in the federal prison system. So barring an unlikely grant of clemency from the president, Rinehart, who is serving his time at a medium-security prison in Pennsylvania, will have to complete at least 85 percent of his term (assuming time off for good behavior), or nearly 13 years.

* An NPR executive resigned after remarking in a secretly recorded conversation that the Tea Party was full of racists, despite the fact that this is true.

* Oil prices are rising on Mideast turmoil.

* Blockbuster, the dominant player in the storefront video rental market, reached an agreement with its creditors to be auctioned as a business to the highest bidder, rather than having its assets liquidated. Netflix, video on demand, and kiosk video rentals have destroyed its profitability. The chain, which grew dramatically through acquisition of competitors, also probably simply had too many stores for the market's demand and hasn't been able to shutter them fast enough. For example, in Denver at 6th Avenue and Grant Street, it once had two stores less than a block apart - both are now shuttered.

* Department store H&M has decided to open up stores in greater Denver, with the Saks location at the Cherry Creek Mall which is closing likely to be one of them.

Abroad

* Japan has had two major earthquakes in the last week. One was magnitude 7.2 on the Richter scale, and the last night there was an 8.8 magnitude quake that also gave rise to a Tsunami that reached as far as Hawaiii this morning and will be experienced as far off as Peru. The first Japanese quake produced only minimal damage. The current one killed about a hundred people and led to considerable property damage in a few industrial areas mostly from the tsunami waves rather than the earthquake itself. Similar magnitude earthquakes in Iran, Indonesia and Haiti have produced massive loss of life and long term devistation, but Japan's earthquake conscious building codes and better prepared people prevented the damage from being greater. A smaller earthquake in China this weak produced loss of life and property damage comparable to that experienced by last night's massive quake.

* Civil war continues to rage in Libya and France has recognized the rebels as the legitimate government of the country; NATO nations remain reluctant to intervene militarily there. Egyptians will vote on amendments to military proposed amendments its constitution this month to prepare for prompt democratic elections that will transfer power from a military council to civilians. Protestors in Jordan have complained that a new prime minister is stalling on proposals for political reforms, using the fact that the country's 32 political parties are too fragmented to produce quality elections; the main democratic reform that has been demanded is to shift control of the executive branch from the king to a prime minster selected by parliament. Police in a predominantly Shi'ite part of Saudi Arabia shot five protestors at a small demonstration; protests in the absolute monarchy have been muted compared to elsewhere in the region - in part because Saudi Arabia is more repressive and in part because the current Saudi King is popular with majority Sunnis in the country.

* The Daili Lama in Tibet proposed on the anniversary of the day of Tibet's failed 1959 bid to free itself from China, to transfer political power of the government in exile to elected leaders, leaving himself and his successors as spiritual leaders only. Proposed succession to his position is currently unclear as he has also proposed reforms to the traditional approach rooted in the notion that he is reincarnated. China remains officially outraged at any talk of Tibetan independence, or the notion that Taiwan is not part of China. China is also cracking down in an effort to prevent the Jasmine revolution of the Middle East from spreading to it.

Medicine

* A drug to prevent the spread of M.S. has worked in a mouse model. A mouse model of a drug to treat Alzheimer's disease and damage from minor strokes in the brain has also been successful. A new drug to treat lupus has come on the market. Progress has been made in developing a new class of anti-malaria drugs based on a chemotherapy drug.

READ MORE - Friday News Dump