mikek's Open Salon Blog

Why do you/would you believe in God?

Mon, 1 Jun 2009 20:06:48 -0400

Recently I have followed a few of NPR’s interviews with their staffer Barbara Bradley Hagerty concerning her new book Fingerprints of God: The Search for the Science of Spirtuality. Based on the interviews and the reviews, I plan to read the book in the very near future. As a devout agnostic, I am always fascinated by well thought out arguments concerning the existence of a god.

Further, as a life long neurotic, I have been pondering the seemingly convoluted logic of Patricia Pearson in her book A Brief History of Anxiety. Pearson makes the compelling argument in her book that much of the thinking that supports feelings most anxiety is irrational. With that, she asserts that engaging in seemingly irrational thinking and behaviors such as believing in god and going to church is rational if it is effective in relieving anxiety, especially anxiety that is debilitating. This makes pragmatic sense to me, although I can’t bring myself to believe in god(s) or attend church on anything but a very episodic basis.

So dear OSers, what would it take to make you believe in god(s)? Or, if you do believe in god(s) what drives you to believe in god(s). I am interested in both empirical arguments and pragmatic arguments similar to Pearson’s. Further, if you believe in god(s), what are some of the important qualities of god(s) that you feel it would be important to convey to nonbelievers or agnostics? And whatever your stance on the existence of god(s), how important is it that others share your perspective? Thank you for indulging my curiosity.

Dead Beat Fathers Linked to Women's Unhappiness

Tue, 26 May 2009 14:05:31 -0400

Ross Douthat

In the May 26 edition of the New York Times, the Times’ conservative editorialist Ross Douthat briefly summarizes a new study indicating that the happiness of women has declined relative to men over the past 30 years. Significantly, this decline cuts across both race and class making it a phenomenon that is likely not related to changes in income or in the social status of various ethnic groups. Unfortunately, the link to the study in the editorial is to the abstract with one having to pay to be able to review the entire document.

Douthat goes on to cite studies concerning the declining rates of two parent families and the extra burdens of women who have dramatically expanded their roles in the workplace while still carrying the brunt of the work associated with child care and maintaining a home. Based on these trends, he feels that both cultural conservatives and feminists should agree on the need for public policies that would ease the burden of child-rearing and work for women.

Then, in something of a giant leap of logic in which the facts and reasoning remain opaque, Douthat infers that the increasing incidence of single mothers in this country are related to the declining happiness of women. And because of this alleged social science fact, feminists and social conservatives should join forces to stigmatize serial baby fathers and trophy wife collectors. But, Douthat wearily concludes his editorial by saying that such a strategy would not work because Americans no longer have the stomach to ostracize the sexually irresponsible and because of that, American women are unhappier than they were thirty years ago.

I love reading the NY Times editorial page and I do feel there is a need to add some more conservative balance to the paper’s roster of regular editorialists. Unfortunately, the specious logic demonstrated by Mr. Douthat does not serve the conservative cause well. In the future, I hope the Times will feature conservative editorialists that can present reasoned and logical positions on social issues that do not embarrass the conservative political stance. Or maybe that is not possible, but I sincerely hope that is not the case.

Or, could it be that I have misunderstood the reasoning and logic of Mr. Douthat’s editorial? Could social policies stigmatizing dead beat father increase the happiness of women? Am I wrong to challenge the Times’ choice of Mr. Douthat as their conservative editorialist? I ask you, Dear Readers, for your comments.

Guns; a treatment for male impotence?

Thu, 9 Apr 2009 10:04:35 -0400

During the past 30 years, cigarettes have been regulated because of the demonstrated detrimental relationship between their use and public health. Not everyone who smokes dies at an early age or suffers smoking related diseases, but enough do to allow the public to feel that there is a need for reasonable public regulation of their production, use, and distribution. Similar strategies to limit public harm have been used with various types of drugs, alcohol, automobiles, consumer products, and buildings. Further, liability concerning the safety and design of these entities have been extended to their manufacturers. The success of these efforts are often difficult to measure, but there is general agreement that the regulation has served a general public good. Very few Americans would want to go back to the days when there was no FDA or building codes.

Unfortunately, this movement to protect the public from dangerous products have not been extended to firearms. This is, in part, due to a very narrow interpretation of the Second Amendment. But I believe there is also a strong component of fear and anxiety among a substantial portion of our citizens, mostly male, that near unbridled access to a wide range of firearms in this country assuages. Further, I believe that these fears have been aggravated most recently by declines in economic and social status and pundits who seek to enhance these fears. Until these anxieties and what I view as a sense of impotence are reduced in this population, I sincerely doubt that efforts toward sensible regulation of this menace to the public’s safety and health will be successful. I hope I am proved to be wrong.

Note: This was partially written in response to Timothy Egan's blog post in the NY Times, 4/9/09.

Guilt Reduction on OS

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 20:03:52 -0400

Designator has a recent post about Salon’s financial status. Two things are very important to note in his post:

As of September 30, 2008, Salon had an accumulated deficit of $98.2 million.
Salon also derives a significant portion of its revenues from its Salon Premium subscription program. This source of revenue has been decreasing since Salon's quarter ended December 31, 2004 when paid subscriptions peaked at approximately 89,100 and decreased to approximately 28,500 as of September 30, 2008. Salon expects this downward trend to continue.

To me, these are very frightening figures which I feel reflect a very real threat to the continued viability of Salon and OS. If you feel Salon and OS are an important part of your life, as I do, a very simple thing you can do to help Salon and OS is to become a Salon Premium subscriber.

If nothing else, becoming a Premium Subscriber might make you feel less guilty when you indulge in the excellent writing that you find at these two sites. And if you haven’t felt guilty about not being a Premium Subscriber, I sincerely hope that you will after reader this post. As a former victim of the Catholic school system, I can assure you that guilt reduction feels very good.

Boys, a Buick, and Vietnam

Thu, 5 Mar 2009 18:03:06 -0500

It was the fall of 1967. I was almost 16, anxiously awaiting my next birthday so I could get my drivers’ license. My two friends were in the front seat of the large Buick station wagon and I was sitting in the back, alone. Jeff, the driver, was 18 and was to graduate that year. Denny, in the front passenger seat, was 17, a Junior. We were all driving home from high school, basking in the luxury of not having to ride the dreaded school bus.

We were driving on a winding, rural, Illinois blacktop, the road shiny and wet from a recent rain. The Buick was almost new and it had a reputation among the boys in our neighborhood for the large and powerful 400 cubic inch engine it had under the hood. You could scorch the rear tires on it by stomping on the accelerator and that placed it in high esteem among us, even though it was a station wagon.

The rain was starting again as we approached a steep curve on the road. After the curve, there was a half mile of a straight road where there was the turn off for our neighborhood. My older friends, including Jeff and Denny, often ran trials on their cars to see who could run the fastest at the end of a quarter mile on that straight piece of road. When I got my driver’s license, I would do the same.

As we started in to the steep curve, Jeff shouted a boyish “Let’s goose it!” and stomped on the accelerator of the station wagon. With that, that big car did something it wasn’t supposed to do. It went into a big, ungainly spin on the rain slick road.

To this day, I did something that I still doubt I had the presence of mind to do. I was sitting in the seat behind Denny. It didn’t have a seat belt. I could see that we were very likely going to go off the road soon and hit one of the many large trees on either side of the road. I reasoned that the best thing for me to do was to lie down on the seat so that when we impacted, my body would be thrown into the back of the front seat rather than through the windshield. I followed that reasoning and laid down on the seat with my head on the seat behind Jeff, the driver.

The next thing I knew, the car had wrapped itself broadside on the passenger side around a tree in a ditch on the left side of the road. My torso below the waste was trapped in the wreckage and I could not get out. Broken glass was all over the place and my face had numerous lacerations and was bleeding. My right arm hurt, but it worked. Rain was coming into the car from the broken windows and was starting to soak me. I could see and hear cars above us going by on the road.

Both Jeff and Denny had had seatbelts on. They were not trapped in the car like I was, but they were both not responding to my yells and shakes to their heads and shoulders from the back seat. I noticed that Denny had a large, blue black bruise on the back of his neck. I tried for a number of minutes to arouse them but they were both definitely out.

My next strategy was to start screaming as loud as I could to hopefully get the attention of someone driving by on the road above us. I felt unseemly yelling like that, but the rain was continuing and the sun was starting to go down. I was desperate.

It was getting dark when someone finally found us. Soon after that, two tow trucks arrived and they slowly unwrapped the car around the tree. Jeff was taken away in an ambulance. I was taken away in another ambulance with Denny and his mother.

In the ambulance I learned that Denny was dead. The bruise on the back of his neck was from a broken neck. His mother cried and cried over Denny’s body all the way to the hospital. I was numb and didn’t know what to say to her.

Jeff had had a concussion, but was otherwise OK. I had a broken arm and a face that had been sliced up with window glass. I was lucky to have survived as I had, considering where I was sitting in the car.

After one day at home, I returned to school. I told my mother that I would need a doctor’s excuse to get out of gym class. She felt that was ridiculous, with a cast on my arm and my scratched up face and so I skeptically agreed with her reasoning.

And it turned out, I did have to suit up for gym class because I didn’t have a doctor’s excuse. And I did whatever calisthenics and exercises I could with my broken arm. And that seemed to fit the tenor of the time, as the Vietnam War was in full swing and the gym teachers were preparing us to be tough in preparation to go off to war and serve our country. And the gym teachers were not going to cut any slack to the budding geek, antiwar protestor that they could sense I was going to be.