For several months, I've been working on The Golden Bough by Sir James George Frazer (1854-1941), that scandalous defining achievement of civilization in which Frazer very thoroughly and eloquently dissects the entirety of magical and superstitious practices across all cultures and eras of human existence. As it happened, on the night of December 24th I got to a passage about the origins of Christmas. It's not hard to see why the book ignited such a controversy (which Frazer tried to defuse by censoring it himself - a new abridgment restores the offending material).

[T]he modern student of comparative religion traces such resemblances to the similar and independent workings of the mind of man in his sincere, if crude, attempts to fathom the secret of the universe, and to adjust his little life to its awful mysteries. However that may be, there can be no doubt that the Mithraic religion proved a formidable rival to Christianity, combining as it did a solemn ritual with aspirations after moral purity and a hope of immortality. Indeed the issue of the conflict between the two faiths appears for a time to have hung in the balance. An instructive relic of the long struggle is preserved in our festival of Christmas, which the Church seems to have borrowed directly from its heathen rival. In the Julian calendar the twenty-fifth of December was reckoned the winter solstice, and it was regarded as the Nativity of the Sun, because the day begins to lengthen and the power of the sun to increase from that turning-point of the year. ... Now Mithra was regularly identified by his worshippers with the Sun, the Unconquered Sun, as they called him; hence his nativity also fell on the twenty-fifth of December. The Gospels say nothing as to the day of Christ’s birth, and accordingly the early Church did not celebrate it. In time, however, the Christians of Egypt came to regard the sixth of January as the date of the Nativity, and the custom of commemorating the birth of the Saviour on that day gradually spread until by the fourth century it was universally established in the East. But at the end of the third or the beginning of the fourth century the Western Church, which had never recognised the sixth of January as the day of the Nativity, adopted the twenty-fifth of December as the true date, and in time its decision was accepted also by the Eastern Church.

... The motives for the innovation are stated with great frankness by a Syrian writer, himself a Christian. “The reason,� he tells us, “why the fathers transferred the celebration of the sixth of January to the twenty-fifth of December was this. It was a custom of the heathen to celebrate on the same twenty-fifth of December the birthday of the Sun, at which they kindled lights in token of festivity. In these solemnities and festivities the Christians also took part. Accordingly when the doctors of the Church perceived that the Christians had a leaning to this festival, they took counsel and resolved that the true Nativity should be solemnised on that day and the festival of the Epiphany on the sixth of January. Accordingly, along with this custom, the practice has prevailed of kindling fires till the sixth.�

[Frazer describes the similarities between Christian Easter and an older celebration of the resurrection of Attis, which I'll save for another time, perhaps in late March]

In point of fact it appears from the testimony of an anonymous Christian, who wrote in the fourth century of our era, that Christians and pagans alike were struck by the remarkable coincidence between the death and resurrection of their respective deities, and that the coincidence formed a theme of bitter controversy between the adherents of the rival religions, the pagans contending that the resurrection of Christ was a spurious imitation of the resurrection of Attis, and the Christians asserting with equal warmth that the resurrection of Attis was a diabolical counterfeit of the resurrection of Christ. In these unseemly bickerings the heathen took what to a superficial observer might seem strong ground by arguing that their god was the older and therefore presumably the original, not the counterfeit, since as a general rule an original is older than its copy. This feeble argument the Christians easily rebutted. They admitted, indeed, that in point of time Christ was the junior deity, but they triumphantly demonstrated his real seniority by falling back on the subtlety of Satan, who on so important an occasion had surpassed himself by inverting the usual order of nature.

Of course! Satan did it. That's that.

Frazer draws some interesting conclusions from this about how the early Church evangelized.

Taken altogether, the coincidences of the Christian with the heathen festivals are too close and too numerous to be accidental. They mark the compromise which the Church in the hour of its triumph was compelled to make with its vanquished yet still dangerous rivals. The inflexible Protestantism of the primitive missionaries, with their fiery denunciations of heathendom, had been exchanged for the supple policy, the easy tolerance, the comprehensive charity of shrewd ecclesiastics, who clearly perceived that if Christianity was to conquer the world it could do so only by relaxing the too rigid principles of its Founder, by widening a little the narrow gate which leads to salvation. In this respect an instructive parallel might be drawn between the history of Christianity and the history of Buddhism. Both systems were in their origin essentially ethical reforms born of the generous ardour, the lofty aspirations, the tender compassion of their noble Founders, two of those beautiful spirits who appear at rare intervals on earth like beings come from a better world to support and guide our weak and erring nature. Both preached moral virtue as the means of accomplishing what they regarded as the supreme object of life, the eternal salvation of the individual soul, though by a curious antithesis the one sought that salvation in a blissful eternity, the other in a final release from suffering, in annihilation. But the austere ideals of sanctity which they inculcated were too deeply opposed not only to the frailties but to the natural instincts of humanity ever to be carried out in practice by more than a small number of disciples, who consistently renounced the ties of the family and the state in order to work out their own salvation in the still seclusion of the cloister. If such faiths were to be nominally accepted by whole nations or even by the world, it was essential that they should first be modified or transformed so as to accord in some measure with the prejudices, the passions, the superstitions of the vulgar. This process of accommodation was carried out in after ages by followers who, made of less ethereal stuff than their masters, were for that reason the better fitted to mediate between them and the common herd. Thus as time went on, the two religions, in exact proportion to their growing popularity, absorbed more and more of those baser elements which they had been instituted for the very purpose of suppressing. Such spiritual decadences are inevitable. The world cannot live at the level of its great men. Yet it would be unfair to the generality of our kind to ascribe wholly to their intellectual and moral weakness the gradual divergence of Buddhism and Christianity from their primitive patterns. For it should never be forgotten that by their glorification of poverty and celibacy both these religions struck straight at the root not merely of civil society but of human existence. The blow was parried by the wisdom or the folly of the vast majority of mankind, who refused to purchase a chance of saving their souls with the certainty of extinguishing the species.

In short, there's theology and then there's superstition. High-falutin' theodicy may help intellectuals like (but perhaps not including) James George Frazer sleep at night, but if you want to convert a lot of average schmucks instead of a few philosophers, you need to throw in some demons. Better yet, if they already have their own heathen beliefs, explain how those are actually just a small part of your own grand pastiche, and have always been so. The Romans had been doing this for centuries by giving Latin names to the gods of conquered peoples and welcoming them to the pantheon, but monotheistic Christians had it rough because theirs was a jealous God. Against all odds, they were able to bend enough to spread enlightenment to the whole civilized world.

I'll let Frazer close with some thoughts about the anti-humanistic effect this had on our history (which actually came a little earlier in the book).

Greek and Roman society was built on the conception of the subordination of the individual to the community, of the citizen to the state; it set the safety of the commonwealth, as the supreme aim of conduct, above the safety of the individual whether in this world or in the world to come. Trained from infancy in this unselfish ideal, the citizens devoted their lives to the public service and were ready to lay them down for the common good; or if they shrank from the supreme sacrifice, it never occurred to them that they acted otherwise than basely in preferring their personal existence to the interests of their country. All this was changed by the spread of Oriental religions which inculcated the communion of the soul with God and its eternal salvation as the only objects worth living for, objects in comparison with which the prosperity and even the existence of the state sank into insignificance. The inevitable result of this selfish and immoral doctrine was to withdraw the devotee more and more from the public service, to concentrate his thoughts on his own spiritual emotions, and to breed in him a contempt for the present life which he regarded merely as a probation for a better and an eternal. The saint and the recluse, disdainful of earth and rapt in ecstatic contemplation of heaven, became in popular opinion the highest ideal of humanity, displacing the old ideal of the patriot and hero who, forgetful of self, lives and is ready to die for the good of his country. The earthly city seemed poor and contemptible to men whose eyes beheld the City of God coming in the clouds of heaven. Thus the centre of gravity, so to say, was shifted from the present to a future life, and however much the other world may have gained, there can be little doubt that this one lost heavily by the change. A general disintegration of the body politic set in. The ties of the state and the family were loosened: the structure of society tended to resolve itself into its individual elements and thereby to relapse into barbarism; for civilisation is only possible through the active co-operation of the citizens and their willingness to subordinate their private interests to the common good. Men refused to defend their country and even to continue their kind. In their anxiety to save their own souls and the souls of others, they were content to leave the material world, which they identified with the principle of evil, to perish around them. This obsession lasted for a thousand years. The revival of Roman law, of the Aristotelian philosophy, of ancient art and literature at the close of the Middle Ages, marked the return of Europe to native ideals of life and conduct, to saner, manlier views of the world. The long halt in the march of civilisation was over. The tide of Oriental invasion had turned at last. It is ebbing still.

He says that he is “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa� because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really�, and I know that this “hot potato� is going to be difficult to address. His hope is that everyone is equal, but he counters that “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true�.

Is this the explanation for the term "Latin lover," and can it explain why the pale faced British descend on Spain in the summer? Does it explain why people from Scandinavian countries seem to enjoy nudist camps?

It is fair to say that at this point in the lecture most of the audience began to prickle at the tone of the argument.

He's not the first renowned scientist to express stupid opinions. There's an interesting article in tomorrow's NY TImes about this phenomenon:

Kary Mullis, after grabbing a piece of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, dove head first off the platform, expounding on the virtues of LSD and astrology and expressing his doubts about global warming, the ozone hole, and H.I.V. as the cause of AIDS. On the latter point he was following the lead of Peter Duesberg, a molecular and cell biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and member of the National Academy of Sciences, who still insists that AIDS is caused by recreational drug use and even by one of the pharmaceuticals used for treatment.

Now, Mullis is no surprise. Popular opinion (among fellow scientists who haven't won their own Nobel) is he's just a surfer who had one good idea and made it big. He openly credits LSD with helping him think of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technology, and I wouldn't be surprised if his horoscope tipped him off too. Meanwhile, Duesberg is only really known for his far-out, probably dangerous, views on AIDS - in tandem with his creds as a biologist. But there are other examples the article doesn't mention, like William Shockley, who helped invent the transistor, and went on to do what he felt was much more important: advocate eugenics.

One pessimistic explanation is that the huge (relative) recognition conferred by top scientific awards goes straight to decent people's heads and corrupts them, so they start spouting nonsense because they think everything that comes out of their mouths is gold (and there are always people around to write it down). Another possibility, which might be even more pessimistic or it might not, is that some scientists consistently spit out crazy speculations throughout their lives, and after one of those things turns out to be right, people bother to listen to the rest. Both fit with this sad observation:

“In contrast to composers,� Dr. Rees observed, “there are few scientists whose last works are their greatest.�

Well, one issue is clear. I'm a scientist and I have extreme opinions - where's my prize?

...

Witness the basement on a recent Sunday at the Colorado Community Church in the Englewood area of Denver, where Tim Foster, 12, and Chris Graham, 14, sat in front of three TVs, locked in violent virtual combat as they navigated on-screen characters through lethal gun bursts. Tim explained the game’s allure: “It’s just fun blowing people up.�

Onward, Christian commandos! I guess it's a logical progression from animated vegetables, trashy novel series, and rock music to violent video games, though it seems like there should have been a line drawn somewhere. What teenage male could resist a well-organized fiesta of digitized gunfire in a place his parents are more than happy to let him go? Especially if he's too young to buy the game himself?

Ironically, the glorification of violence isn't the only thematic issue that seems like it should give church leaders pause:

Complicating the debate over the appropriateness of the game as a church recruiting tool are the plot’s apocalyptic and religious overtones. The hero’s chief antagonists belong to the Covenant, a fervent religious group that welcomes the destruction of Earth as the path to their ascension.

Imagine the struggle of parents who don't want their kids to go to Hell, but have trouble telling them not to go a to a church-sponsored event, because that event is an orgy of pixelated bloodshed where the gamers will try their damnedest to stop a bunch of (fictional) end-times fundamentalists from ruining the planet. What's next?

“If you want to connect with young teenage boys and drag them into church, free alcohol and pornographic movies would do it,� said James Tonkowich, president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, a nonprofit group that assesses denominational policies.

Hey, my church offered free alcohol; I grew up Catholic. But then, I was also taught my halo had to be earned. As for the smut, I guess one route is to develop Abstinence Porn, which would be even more platonic than softcore. Sounds hot. Of course, you could also stick to the real thing and use the same logic as with the video game. It's just on a TV screen, it's not real sin - see how she's faking it? Jeepers.

I came home to find two slips from them on the door of my building (one only had the first initial of my first name for some reason), saying they needed me to sign for the package in person, even though it's just a bunch of CDs. But I can't do that when I'm not home, and like most people I'm not home during the business day. According to the little slips, the next time they'll attempt delivery will be while I'm in a meeting on Monday - they can't come on Saturdays because there's a good chance I might not be at work that day and then they'd have to deliver it. Now I'll probably have to find a way to get to their headquarters by bus.

Next time I'll use the Postal Service. Even a turnaround of 5-8 days may well be faster than however long it will take me to get this package next week. And the USPS is more than happy to leave a box next to my mailbox inside the building - sometimes I'll even find one right outside the door to my room.

My favorite part is what it says on the website if I try to track my shipment: "Your package has experienced an exception."

Okay, $9,250 is more than any song is worth. But then, Ms. Thomas was the one who refused the initial fines in the thousands and took the case to court, where she thought she could evade justice by being tech-savvier than the recording industry. Replacing a hard drive isn't savvy, Jammie.

What troubles me is just how vehemently people seem to feel like it's their right to shoplift online. For example,

it's not about "protecting the artists" or copyright infringement... it's about money and power which these RIAA goons have in their clutches and they don't want to lose it. They'd rather wipe their a$$es with every single person they can hack underhandedly. Run and hide 12 year olds, and middle-aged soccer moms, and cranky old men, because you're next! ... Posted by: WTF!! | Oct 4, 2007 2:51:34 PM

I don't get it. Artists (or the corporations that employ them) are in no way obligated to provide their services for free to anyone who feels like listening. If an album is that great, why aren't you willing to pay for it? And if you do choose to break the law, don't cry foul when you're nabbed. That's the risk you knew you were taking. Part of civil disobedience isn't running from the law; you're supposed to confront it if you think it's wrong.

Anywho, one prominent participant in the recent meeting decided he'd go public about one thing that happened there:

If neither of the two major political parties nominates an individual who pledges himself or herself to the sanctity of human life, we will join others in voting for a minor-party candidate.

This proposition didn't garner a consensus, but there was apparently some agreement. So if the Republicans fail to nominate someone evangelier-than-thou (John McCain is already a step ahead in the pandering dance, which seems to be his thing now), such as a Mor(m)on or a thrice-married sometime cross-dresser who used to cohabit with a gay couple and thinks he's qualified because something bad happened on his watch, they may just start their own party.

I hope that happens. Why? First, it would steal votes from the GOP like Ralph Nader used to steal from Al Gore. The system is rigged to keep things nice and simple by preventing third parties from winning the presidency. Second, if the fundamentalist herd threw its mass entirely behind this new candidate, the winning president wouldn't owe them anything, even if he's a Republican. Third, if the theocratic lobby went to all the trouble of separating itself from other electoral forces, Divine Right's defeat in a fair election would be an abundantly clear sign that America doesn't feel like going back to the Dark Ages.

So if this new party were to form, who might they pick for leader of the formerly free world? Well, maybe that's what this unabashed leak in the NY Times is about. This could be an all-too-subtle way for Jim Dobson, probably evangelical conservatism's most prominent lay member, to throw his halo in the ring. All he needs now is a running mate. May I suggest Ted Haggard? I understand he's looking for work, and he doesn't mind being the bottom in a two-man operation.

If they hadn't paid the, um, fumigation specialist with school funds (laundered through a part-time staff member for an unrelated shuttle service), we might never have found out. One can only wonder what goes on in parts of the country where exorcists are even more plentiful and work pro bono.

I left the 110-minute session thinking that far from being worn down by the past few years, Bush seems empowered. His self-confidence is the most remarkable feature of his presidency.

Tomorrow, Paul Krugman, one of the liberal rest, chastises "enablers" among the pundosphere:

In a coordinated public relations offensive, the White House is using reliably friendly pundits — amazingly, they still exist — to put out the word that President Bush is as upbeat and confident as ever. It might even be true.

What I don’t understand is why we’re supposed to consider Mr. Bush’s continuing confidence a good thing.

...

It doesn’t demonstrate Mr. Bush’s strength of character; it shows that he has lost touch with reality.

Did someone spill coffee on someone else down editorial way?

They would be wrapped in duct tape, so teachers could not shut them off by removing their batteries, and set for 9:15. And when they went off, the seniors would rise and march triumphantly outside to acknowledge that the fat lady — or at least her alarm clock — had sung. They had made it through high school.

Now, with 19 students facing felony charges for placing false bombs, it’s pretty clear it wasn’t such a good idea after all.

Of all the senior pranks out there, this is one of the tamest - the only cleanup involved is picking up a bunch of clocks. However, the school has apparently decided the pranksters should spend their next few years in prison, not college. What is the world coming to?

I could forgive the school officials for getting antsy about what might be attached to clocks planted in their building after hours, though it shows just how well al-Qaeda's (or the Bush administration's) attempts to terrorize the American public have worked. I'm much more perplexed by their decision to press charges. These kids don't seem dangerous - as far as anyone can tell, the idea that their pranks could lead to a bomb scare never even occurred to them. (That seems to happen too often.)

By week’s end, officials announced that the 19 charged could get their diplomas but could not attend graduation ceremonies and that those students who helped finance the operation — perhaps a quarter of the class of more than 200 — could attend graduation only if they did community service first.

If I were among the innocent, I'd be awfully tempted to skip the ceremony in protest. I don't think that's a punishment the school should use for a senior prank, so the students should boycott them right back.

I hesitate to take sides on this. It's just fun to see crazy people screaming at each other. O'Reilly gets so loud that you can hear his voice echoing in his little studio. And I always love when he says "I'll give you the last word" and doesn't.

I've often wanted to do more to help defeat junk e-mail, which is often called "spam," though I have mixed feelings about that term as both a Minnesotan and a vegetarian. In 2005, spam cost the world $50 billion, about eight months' spending on the war in Iraq. One idea is to launch a "distributed denial of service" (DDoS) attack on every jerk who sends me a message with the word "Cialis" misspelled. In a DDoS, you simply overwhelm the target's Internet access by simultaneously sending him or her (her?) as much useless noise from as many different places as you possibly can. The target system's resources are overloaded trying to deal with all of that junk - poetic justice.

Naturally, that would be illegal, and vigilantism is problematic at best. The fine folks at Spamhaus, for example, gather and publish information about suspected spammers, ostensibly so the developers of spam-filtering software can add to their block lists, but it's tempting to do other things with that information. These third-party solutions are generally constrained by what can be done legally, and in most cases, for a profit.

I would like to see a new, international quasi-NGO formed to deal with this problem. Perhaps a branch of Interpol. We could call it the Bureau for the Elimination of Electronic Fraud (BEEF). Unlike existing third parties, it would have the authority to use any means necessary to stop spammers, like a DDoS or worse. (I'm picturing a pudgy, bespectacled, greasy-haired teenager sitting in the dim glow of his LCD monitor and filling his fat face with Cheetos when a SWAT-like team kicks down the door to his parents' basement to charge in and point some kind of electromagnetic pulse gun at his dual-core liquid-cooled Linux box, threatening to pull the trigger if he makes any sudden keystrokes.) (Disquieted by the uncanny imagery, I'm now looking over my shoulder before I pick up the fork again with one hand and resume typing with the other.) It would be even cooler if this organization played nicely with developers. Imagine a cow-shaped button on your e-mail client that lets you automatically report a message to the BEEF for further investigation, with a single click.

Naturally, this could only go so far, because the organization wouldn't be able to read any e-mail until someone voluntarily submits it for investigation. To do anything more pre-emptive than that would violate the unofficial right of privacy, but that alone isn't so bad: I have a reasonable expectation that private e-mail I write to you won't be read by government snoops on its way (even though I know that's not true, but I have to rely on trust to feel safe in the unlikelihood that you'd forward the message to someone who shouldn't see it or let someone less trustworthy find out your password. This wouldn't be a serious handicap, and if everyone does their part, it would make the Internet a riskier place to commit fraud.

But, as always, no one asked me.

The study linked narcissism to poor social skills, higher levels of infidelity and game playing, violent behavior, and relationships that are less warm and intimate.

I'm not quite sure why infidelity is in the same category as game playing, but all of these other things could be associated with the rise of information technology and the ways it's changed communication - cell phones, e-mail, instant messages, text messages, chat rooms, and so forth. By vastly shortening the distances between people who live in opposite corners of the globe, instantaneous electronic communication has actually made us quite a bit more distant from the people we see In Real Life every day.

The authors suggested the increase in narcissism might stem from the "self-esteem" movement of the 1980s, in which parents and school programs worked to improve the self-esteem of children.

I always worried about that. The biggest jerks I know are invariably the most egotistical people I know. They already esteem themselves so much more highly than the losers they pick on; what good does it do to raise their self-esteem even higher? And it's such an impediment to self-improvement and learning when you're convinced you're already perfect and know everything. I once met a philosopher who defined arrogance as the belief that you have nothing to learn from other people (V. Tiberius and J. Walker, APhQ 35(4):379-390, 1998, if you're into reading), and I've never really encountered a better definition, even though that one seems so contrived at first.

Finance and nonprofit management junior Eric Larsen said he disagrees with the study's findings, citing his experience with Students Today Leaders Forever, an organization that puts on the annual Pay It Forward Tour, in which students complete community service projects in a different city during spring break.

"I would describe (our generation) as more willing to give up their time … more socially aware and more capable of making a positive impact," he said.

Goody-goody activists are more self-regarding than anyone! You have to be pretty self-centered to inundate me with as much propaganda about your activities as STLF does, I should think - they're almost as bad as Teach for America. Look how he managed to plug an event in his interview. Superficial, résumé-building volunteerism for feel-good causes that really don't address any big problems facing the world is pure ego-masturbation; when all else fails, you can say "I may spend two hours a day adjusting my hairdo, but I spend three hours a week presenting a semaphore version of The Purpose-Driven Life to bored residents of the upscale retirement home at the other end of my suburban hometown."

Well, I can sympathize. I used to be a narcissist myself, in fact. But not anymore; now I'm simply perfect.