Doug Marlette, 57; Cartoonist, Vocal Defender of Free Speech, dies in car accident.
He paired a pointed opinion with a take-no-prisoners drawing style, and that made his work memorable, said Mike Peters, an old friend and cartoonist at the Dayton Daily News. One piece that still makes Peters marvel was one that ran years ago, a few days before Easter — it was a silhouette of Jesus walking up Calvary, carrying an electric chair, instead of a cross.
Who can humanists ask for political absolution?
Louisiana Sen. David Vitter, whose telephone number was disclosed by the so-called ”D.C. Madam” accused of running a prostitution ring, says he is sorry for a ‘’serious sin” and that he has already made peace with his wife.
”This was a very serious sin in my past for which I am, of course, completely responsible,” Vitter said Monday in a printed statement. ”Several years ago, I asked for and received forgiveness from God and my wife in confession and marriage counseling. Out of respect for my family, I will keep my discussion of the matter there — with God and them. But I certainly offer my deep and sincere apologies to all I have disappointed and let down in any way.”
This Red Mosque is starting to sound like Jonestown
There was evidence that many had been brainwashed into a cult of martyrdom, and the authorities feared last night that some were being prepared to be suicide bombers. In barely eight weeks, Saima had been transformed from a religious but fun-loving girl to a jihadi, grimly craving martyrdom.
At the barricades, her father, Luftullah Khan, a shopkeeper, frantically pestered soldiers to let him rescue both his daughters. But when he got through to them on their mobile telephone, they said they preferred martyrdom to freedom.
“I spoke to my daughter. She said there was no food or water left. I tried to arrange a meeting, but she said, ‘We’re here; my dead body will be here. I will not leave my teachers’,†Khan said.
The guy who tried to incinerate himself in Glasgow had a Ph.D., was from India’s software capital of Bangalore, and spoke the lingo of international business
Ahmed, 28, who was previously thought to be called Khalid, has a masters degree in aeronautical engineering and a doctorate in computational fluid dynamics, a highly specialised subject in which computers are used to simulate the flow of fluids and gases.
The bombs from London and Glasgow consisted of gas cylinders, petrol and a detonating system using mobile phones.
Ahmed was today reported to have left Bangalore, India, in May, telling his family that he was going to Britain to work on “a large-scale confidential project” about global warming.
The Times of India said he told family members: “It involves a lot of travelling. The project has to be started in the United Kingdom. Various people from various countries are involved in this.”
It was also reported today that Dr Ahmed phoned his family in India last Saturday, the day after the foiled bombings in London.
He is reported to have told them: “My earlier presentation failed . . . please pray for me.”
Being an engineer myself, I can say comfortably that an engineering education is not liberalizing, and does not even expose one to the scientific habit of thinking. It’s more like problem-solving within a restricted environment.
In eSkeptic, David Sloan Wilson argues in favor of group selection and against Richard Dawkins, who scorns group selection in favor of the gene’s eye view.
Not only can group selection be a significant evolutionary force, it can sometimes even be the dominating evolutionary force. One of the most important advances in evolutionary biology is a concept called major transitions. It turns out that evolution takes place not only by small mutational change, but also by social groups and multi-species communities becoming so integrated that they become higher-level organisms in their own right. The cell biologist Lynn Margulis proposed this concept in the 1970s to explain the evolution of nucleated cells as symbiotic communities of bacterial cells. The concept was then generalized to explain other major transitions, from the origin of life as communities of cooperating molecular reactions, to multi-cellular organisms and social insect colonies.
Of course, for religion to be favored by group selection, there would have to be some positive aspects to religion, which Dawkins is loath to acknowledge.
One of my projects is a collaboration with the psychologist Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced shick-sent-me-hi), who is best known
among general readers for his books on peak psychological
experience, such as Flow and The Evolving Self. Csikszentmihalyi
pioneered the Experience Sampling Method (ESM) which involves
signaling people at random times during the day, prompting them to
record their external and internal experience — where they are, who
they are with, what they are doing, and what they are thinking and
feeling on a checklist of numerical scales. The ESM is like an
invisible observer, following people around as they go about their
daily lives. It is as close as psychological research gets to the
careful field studies that evolutionary biologists are accustomed to
performing on non-human species, which is why I teamed up with
Csikszentmihalyi to analyze some of his past studies from an
evolutionary perspective.These studies were performed on such a massive scale and with so
much background information that we can compare the psychological
experience of religious believers vs. nonbelievers on a
moment-by-moment basis. We can even compare members of conservative
vs. liberal protestant denominations, when they are alone vs. in the
company of other people. On average, religious believers are more
prosocial than non-believers, feel better about themselves, use
their time more constructively, and engage in long-term planning
rather than gratifying their impulsive desires. On a
moment-by-moment basis, they report being more happy, active,
sociable, involved and excited. Some of these differences remain
even when religious and non-religious believers are matched for
their degree of prosociality. More fine-grained comparisons reveal
fascinating differences between liberal vs. conservative protestant
denominations, with more anxiety among the liberals and
conservatives feeling better in the company of others than when alone.
One group advantage fundamentalists have is the set of rules that everyone follows leads them to align efforts toward the same goal. Individualism often means that people work at cross-purposes. On the other hand, individualism may be more robust, because it is more easily adaptable to differing circumstances.
Fundamentalism religion can last for many generations, which suggests it is well-adapted. It could be that when religions start–as cults centered on a prophet–they are quite fragile, and most cults to not survive. The ones that are passed on from generation to generation have passed through a sieve of selection.
Update: Richard Dawkins replies
The central theme of the book is the question of whether God exists. I agree that it is also interesting to ask whether religion has some kind of Darwinian survival value. But whatever the answer to that might turn out to be, it will make no difference to the central question of whether God exists. Religious belief might have a positive survival value and God might or might not exist. Religious belief might have a negative survival value and God might or might not exist. Moreover, other important aspects of my critique, dealt with in other chapters of The God Delusion, are also unaffected by religion’s possible evolutionary advantages.
As for group selection (either as normally understood or in the idiosyncratic sense of Wilson’s private re-definition, about which he has been obsessing for thirty years), The God Delusion devotes a sympathetic page and half to the possibility that something like it might apply to the special case of religion.
One of the most relevant elements of the
abortive bombings in London and Glawgow is that one of the bombers is an Iraqi who left after the 2003 invasion.
One of the doctors, named by police sources as Bilal Abdulla, trained and qualified in Iraq in 2004, and the other, Mohammed Asha, qualified in Jordan the same year. Dr Asha’s wife is among the seven suspects being held, police have said.
While everyone is innocent until provent guilty, he was caught at the scene emerging from the flaming SUV at Glasgow airport, so his best defense would be insanity rather than pure innocense. It’s not clear if he was a refugee from violence, or left without compulsion. But in any case, it raises the question of how we would exclude potential terrorists from the flow of Iraqi refugees is significant numbers were let into the United States.
A doctor–someone trained to save life–would be the last one we would suspect of being a potential killer. But some doctors are said to develop a God complex, and this might make them more comfortable than the average person in deciding who should die as well as who should live. It should be noted that bin Laden’s top lieutenant, Al-Zawahiri, is a physician.
Bush does seem stoic, but if so, that may not be to stoicism’s credit. Yet he is said to be serene, and not ruminating over the past. Perhaps he should ruminate more.
“I find him serene,” Kissinger said. “I know President Johnson was railing against his fate. That’s not the case with Bush. He feels he’s doing what he needs to do, and he seems to me at peace with himself.”
Bush has virtually given up on winning converts while in office and instead is counting on vindication after he is dead. “He almost has . . . a sense of fatalism,” said Rep. Peter T. King (R-N.Y.), who recently spent a day traveling with Bush. “All he can do is do his best, and 100 years from now people will decide if he was right or wrong. It doesn’t seem to be a false, macho pride or living in your own world. I find him to be amazingly calm.”
To an extent, Bush walls himself off from criticism. He does read newspapers, contrary to public impression, but watches little television news and does not linger in the media echo chamber. “He does a very good job of keeping out the extreme things in his life,” Conaway, the congressman, said. “He doesn’t watch Leno and Letterman. He doesn’t spend a lot of time exposing himself to that sort of stuff. He has a terrific knack of not looking through the rearview mirror.”
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