Are All Religions Identical? Not Quite...
Phil Mole, a frequent contributor to Skeptic and Skeptical Inquirer, explores the pervasive fallacy that all religions are identical ... which he says is held especially by people who've "taken a world religion course in college or read a Joseph Campbell book." A little knowledge is a dangerous thing...
He concludes: "All of us, secularists and theists alike, have a moral obligation to understand the role of religion in the world today. There is no possible understanding of humanity that does not include an understanding of religion, and no possible understanding of religion that does not include honest evaluation of different religious traditions. This is especially true today, when religion inspires not only terrorist hijackers but also those who help their victims."

The Jesus War (New Yorker Piece on Mel Gibson, "The Passion")
A really excellent, in-depth story on Gibson, his movie, his religion and how The Passion controversy came about... long and well worth the read.

Makes Me Sad: Harold Bloom Whacks Stephen King
I like Harold Bloom's work on Shakespeare. I like Stephen King's page turners. I don't think they are necessarily great literature, but I do think they are examples of great storytelling. Harold Bloom feels that King is blight on literature and is horrified by his receipt of the National Book Foundation's "distinguished contribution" award. He told us so in an op-ed that's run in a bunch of papers this week. In it, Bloom denounces most of modern literature, but not through argument, only ranting polemic. His point is lost amid his insufferable arrogance. This is the problem with brilliant guys like Bloom, once they're set in their ways, once their formation is complete, nothing new (save that it imitates what they are already familiar with) could ever possibly be acceptable. Eventually they turn their brilliance to jeremiads lambasting things they've never read and likely wouldn't be able to assimilate even if they had. Again, I'm not saying that Stephen King's work represents some evolution of literary style, but Bloom is not criticizing King alone. He's tarring all of contemporary literature with the same black brush. It's too bad.

News: Firm Bans E-mail to Boost Production
My assistant and good pal Clint popped into my cube the other day to tell me about this article. I said, "nice, but couldn't you have just e-mailed it to me?" (Get it? Because the article is about how e-mail can hinder communication...)
Actually, I've long thought that e-mail was a dangerous media for work purposes ... after all, it relies on writing to convey all the subtle nuances of voice and face in quite important matters. Since most trained writers haven't totally mastered this, why should we expect non-writers to do it with any competence?

The Sounds of Silence
Astronomers at the Institute for Astronomy in Cambridge have heard the music of the universe. That music, they say, sounds like B flat, a B flat 57 octaves lower than middle C and unlikely to ever be useful in a rendition Journey's "Faithfully." The big, low note is rolling out of a super massive black hole 250 million light years from here.

New Images of the Womb Show Expressive Babies
It's very difficult to look at pictures like these and imagine that "life" has not already begun for these babies, despite the fact that they aren't born yet. Of course, even seeing the grainy black and white ultrasound images of David in Kristen's womb, with his hand up next to his face in just the same way he'd sleep in his crib months later, was enough to finish the radical shift in my perspective on the question of "when does life begin." It's unfortunate that gender politics is so often at the core of the abortion argument, when it should this fundamental query about the nature of life's beginning. Simply: if human life has not yet begun, abortion is fine, it's only surgery; if human life has begun, abortion, except when it is an unwanted secondary consequence of a medical treatment to save a mother's life, is untenable. If we don't start from an honest, philosophically grounded base of terms and propositions, broader, important and truly-just social causes such as the battle for fairness, equality and autonomy for both genders, can never be achieved.

This One Would Definitely Be Published Under a Pseudonym
So I'm working on my noir detective horror novel (novelette?) again this afternoon. It's so much fun that I almost don't feel guilty about setting aside more "serious" (money earning) non-fiction and fiction to write it.
Here's an excerpt:
“Last time,” I said. He nodded and turned away, hurrying back up the alley and out into the damp morning. Tendrils of fog recoiled from the mouth of the alley as the wet Atlantic air warmed, steaming the stink of Boston through the city, turning its warren of streets into a giant sieve through which was strained all the pain, the sorrow, the selfishness and the hatred until what was distilled came trickling down this rotten little alley like a pure effluvium of evil.
You see why I wanted out of that racket? That’s the kind of crap I get to thinking when it’s almost dawn and I haven’t slept and there’s a mangled cross in my pocket and a dead girl’s face burned in my brain.

Two years of gibberish
Asked to contribute to "Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War," George Orwell responded: "Will you please stop sending me this bloody rubbish… I am not one of your fashionable pansies like Auden and Spender…"
Too bad a few more of America's literary lights didn't respond in similar fashion after 9-11.

Some think icon in Russian museum is deadly
WHAT???
"An ancient icon depicting Christ has been removed from display at the Hermitage museum in St. Petersburg after claims that its "energy field" is killing staff."
Energy field? I assume they've measured the energy, determined its wavelength, it general properties ... oh, they haven't? Now that's odd. I'm sure that's next on the list.

Pulp Fiction: The death of God and the Royale with Cheese.
Mark T. Conrad looks at the vacuum that exists in the character's moral centers in the movie Pulp Fiction. Interesting take on pop culture symbols being used by the characters to make sense of their lives, in the absence of real, Aristotelian frameworks. A fun read.

The 'Phi-Nest': Source to the golden section, golden mean, divine proportion, Fibonacci series and phi
Spent some time with Kristen's old box of watercolors, a few pencils and a compass today. I was up early with David and went he finally went down for his first nap of the day at 9, I got around to picking up the watercolor techniques book I'd been meaning to get to for a couple of months. Rather than get any serious attempt at painting done, however, I got sidetracked by a brief description of the Golden Section and ended up poking around our art history books and drawing diagrams all day. It really is amazing, though, how many places this proportion turns up in nature, and because of that, in art. This site is a good primer on the topic. (Wish I'd found it earlier this morning.)