Rotundus.com

A post a day is what I've been aiming at the last while. Today's quote comes from the book Seeing Through Cynicism:

I became a Christian in my early twenties both because of my cynicism and in spite of it. Unlike other worldviews that I had considered, I never felt the God of the Bible was asking me to put on rose-colored glasses to upgrade what was wrong with the world. Even the heroes of the Bible were described unsparingly in appalling moral failures - lies, sexual aberrations and murders. I did not have to give up the honesty and realism that I had valued. Cynicism claimed that the world - both inside and outside of our heads - was profoundly broken and bent. I realized that the Christian faith had been saying this for two thousand years, and Judaism for longer than that.

On the other hand, faith in Christ challenged my cynicism. There was something too facile about cynicism. It seemed too complete in its tidy and convenient dismissal of virtue. I realized that many of the key cynical judgements I had made were overreaching what I could actually know. Faith ran with cynicism for some distance and then made a turn in a different direction.

(p. 15,16)

Justin Taylor today pointed out an article in the Wall Street Journal entitled Look Who's Irrational Now:

The reality is that the New Atheist campaign, by discouraging religion, won't create a new group of intelligent, skeptical, enlightened beings. Far from it: It might actually encourage new levels of mass superstition. And that's not a conclusion to take on faith -- it's what the empirical data tell us.

"What Americans Really Believe," a comprehensive new study released by Baylor University yesterday, shows that traditional Christian religion greatly decreases belief in everything from the efficacy of palm readers to the usefulness of astrology. It also shows that the irreligious and the members of more liberal Protestant denominations, far from being resistant to superstition, tend to be much more likely to believe in the paranormal and in pseudoscience than evangelical Christians.

The article also notes the higher-educated people are more likely to believe paranormal phenomena.

My cynical side notes that this study comes from Baylor, a baptist-affiliated university. On the other hand, the actual polling was conducted by Gallup and the surveys they used are available online.

Update: The scores for paranormal vs. belief and church attendance can be found on pages 51-52 (49-50 if you follow the numbers at the bottom of the page) of this PDF.

"Catholics", "black protestants" (does evangelical imply white?), and "mainline protestants" all scored higher for belief in paranormal phenomena than those who affiliated themselves with no religious group. Comparing to those in the "Other" category seems a little silly, as this group is basically by definition made up of those who don't fit into typical categories.

Figure 20 measures church attendance versus belief in the paranormal. It seems as though the authors of the paper must have read a paper I saw on "How to lie with statistics" as the y-axis of the graph only shows the interval 22 - 30, magnifying the apparent differences. The actual difference is only 11% and 16% when comparing weekly church attenders with, respectively, the average score and the score of those who never attended church.

It's surprising how often doggie doo appears in the news. This time the story is from Israel.

An Israeli city is using DNA analysis of dog droppings to reward and punish pet owners.

Under a six-month trial programme launched this week, the city of Petah Tikva, a suburb of Tel Aviv, is asking dog owners to take their animal to a municipal veterinarian, who then swabs its mouth and collects DNA.

The city will use the DNA database it is building to match faeces to a registered dog and identify its owner.

(From Reuters)

A good idea or bureaucracy run crazy? Somehow I doubt that this program will be very cost-effective.

If you have a few minutes in which to do some reading, here's the leadin to a rather fascinating story.

Dave Dobson's past is not a secret. Not technically, anyway - not since the relevant US government intelligence documents were declassified and placed in the vaults of the National Security Archive, in Washington DC. But Dobson, now 65, is a modest man, and once he had discovered his vocation - teaching physics at Beloit College, in Wisconsin - he felt no need to drop dark hints about his earlier life. You could have taken any number of classes at Beloit with Professor Dobson, until his recent retirement, without having any reason to know that in his mid-20s, working entirely as an amateur and equipped with little more than a notebook and a library card, he designed a nuclear bomb.

Today his experiences in 1964 - the year he was enlisted into a covert Pentagon operation known as the Nth Country Project - suddenly seem as terrifyingly relevant as ever. The question the project was designed to answer was a simple one: could a couple of non-experts, with brains but no access to classified research, crack the "nuclear secret"?

(In The Guardian)