unreasonable.org

Margaret Talbot reports in The New Yorker on how religion influences what evangelical teens say they think about sex - and who it impoacts what they actually do:

Regnerus argues that religion is a good indicator of attitudes toward sex, but a poor one of sexual behavior, and that this gap is especially wide among teen-agers who identify themselves as evangelical. The vast majority of white evangelical adolescents—seventy-four per cent—say that they believe in abstaining from sex before marriage... evangelical virgins are the least likely to anticipate that sex will be pleasurable, and the most likely to believe that having sex will cause their partners to lose respect for them. (Jews most often cite pleasure as a reason to have sex, and say that an unplanned pregnancy would be an embarrassment.) But, according to Add Health data, evangelical teen-agers are more sexually active than Mormons, mainline Protestants, and Jews. On average, white evangelical Protestants make their “sexual début”—to use the festive term of social-science researchers—shortly after turning sixteen. Among major religious groups, only black Protestants begin having sex earlier.

I've put up a rough draft of a new chapter for Why Buddha Touched The Earth. Here's an excerpt:

For believers in the paranormal, all these coincidences and visions and unexplained events are evidence of some sort of supernatural entities or powers. To the skeptical, they are the operation of random chance given meaning by the overeager pattern-recognition circuits of the brain, or illusions or delusions or hallucinations, malfunctions of the sensory nervous system.

From a Zen Pagan perspective, neither of these explanations is satisfactory. The true believer's approach makes claims about the objective universe that don't hold up to controlled experiment and observation. The skeptic's neurological reductionism neglects the fact that most events in the universe occur outside of laboratory controls, and ignores the person to whom the experience is happening. The subjective dimension is flattened out.

When we practice ritual, or engage in meditation, or seek otherwise to alter our consciousness, we expect to see and experience strange and unusual things. To encounter "spirits" or to have some other sort of transpersonal experience after staying up all night dancing or drumming around a bonfire, or fasting for days, or sitting unmoving in mediation for hours at a time, or ingesting strange herbs, or working yourself into a ritual frenzy, is not odd. To the practitioner, these experience are the goal of the work.

Dismissing the experience as "mere delusion" is like calling a performance of Bach fugue a "mere disturbance of air". It is technically correct, and even captures important information - understanding that disturbance of air allows for the proper acoustic design of concert halls, after all. But it misses the aesthetic dimension that makes the whole thing worthwhile.

In the same way, calling a shaman's vision a "hallucination" may be accurate, even useful in certain contexts. (If someone was going to risk their life or well-being on information that came to them in a vision, for example, it would be good to point out that such information is not a reliable guide to objective reality.) But it misses the mystical element, the deep emotional content, of the experience.

From Lore Sjöberg's blog over at Wired, a look a what real-life dungeon exploration might look like:

February 20

After several days of travel we have reached the Dungeon, losing only one camel and three graduate students in the trek. One student was eaten by an owlbear, one was spirited away by pixies, and a third decided to get a job as a barista. We are hopeful that soon the priceless treasures of Appreh the Endless will soon be ours to mark carefully with index cards and put in storage.

I really enjoyed the Doctor Who episode Blink. Turns out it's based (loosely) on a nifty short story:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/episodes/2007/blink_annual.shtml

It's an interesting theme in the new series, how encounters with The Doctor change people's lives, opening them up to new possibilities.

Over at Edge, Kevin Kelly confronts the economics of the digital age:

When copies are super abundant, they become worthless. When copies are super abundant, stuff which can't be copied becomes scarce and valuable.

When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied.

Well, what can't be copied?

...

From my study of the network economy I see roughly eight categories of intangible value that we buy when we pay for something that could be free.

Put down whatever you're doing and go read Tim Kreider's artist's statement for this week's The Pain -- When Will It End?.

Highlights:

But there’s a half-millennium of institutional racism on this continent, and social progress happens slowly and unevenly, person by person. There are still vast, savage swaths of unapologetic bigotry in this country. I spent fifteen years living in a county where there's still an active Klan chapter, where guys in diners or bars will casually drop the old N-bomb early on in a conversation just to test you out, to see if you’re one of them or some “edjumacated idjot.” This wasn’t in darkest Alabama or anything—it was technically within the East Coast megalopolis, between Baltimore and Philadelphia, just off I-95. There are millions of people out there who chuckle over the wit of the nickname “Obama-Osama.” And thanks to the second amendment, they can all have top-of-the-line, high-powered rifles with excellent telescopic sights.

Friday, a jury awarded $6.1 million to Louise Ogborn, who said she was subject to a strip-search in a McDonald's back office after someone posing as a cop called the restaurant and accused her of theft.

Ogborn claimed McDonald's was negligent when they failed to warn her and other employees about this caller, who had already struck other fast-food joints. Yes, this wasn't an isolated case: there were over 70 such incidents.

From the fine web comic XKCD. What will they think of us in a few hundred years? Maybe I should go put on a cape.

Just stumbled across this great Robert Anton Wilson / Discordianism video: