Rabbis Searching For Common Ground

by Gary Rosenblatt
Editor and Publisher

Each of the rabbis — Orthodox, Conservative and Reform — on a panel probing the Who is a Jew controversy claimed that his or her movement’s policy on conversion standards was consistent with tradition. Yet they also acknowledged that the divide among them was deep.

Two of the panelists, one Orthodox and one Reform, at last Thursday evening’s community forum, sponsored by The Jewish Week and the JCC in Manhattan, expressed concern that if compromises were not made soon, the strand that holds American Jewish religious life together may be frayed beyond repair. 

Rabbi Robert Levine of the Reform Congregation Rodeph Sholom in Manhattan warned the full house of 250 people at the JCC: “We’re coming very close to the level of sinat chinam” 

[hatred among Jews] that brought about the destruction of the Temple. “Many Orthodox rabbis won’t walk into my shul, and that pains me,” he said, noting that the level of trust among rabbis of different denominations has deteriorated in recent years.

“The key issues here are trust and urgency,” agreed Seth Farber, who received his rabbinic ordination at Yeshiva University and is founder and director of an Israeli organization called ITIM: The Jewish Life Information Center, which helps Israelis navigate the bureaucracy of the Chief Rabbinate on matters of personal status, including marriage, divorce, conversion and burial.

Rabbi Farber cited the writings of Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein, a prominent Orthodox rosh yeshiva in Israel, as suggesting that Orthodox authorities are paying too high a price by adhering to strict standards in defining Jewish status if their position threatens Jewish unity. 

Staking a claim that Conservative Judaism meets traditional standards on conversion, Rabbi Judith Hauptman, professor of Talmud and rabbinic culture at the Jewish Theological Seminary, cited Talmudic passages regarding how one should treat a potential convert. She said each requirement is met by Conservative religious courts.

Rabbi Basil Herring, executive vice president of the Rabbinical Council of America (Orthodox), trod lightly on specifics in questioning whether non-Orthodox rabbis demand that a convert live a fully observant life.

He said that adherence to the mitzvot of the Torah has sustained Jewish life over the centuries and will continue to do so. Trust is important, he said, but added that it is equally important to be truthful, asserting that the Orthodox community has best weathered the storms of assimilation and intermarriage by maintaining halachic standards.

The most serious dispute among the panelists was between the two Orthodox rabbis, with Rabbi Farber charging that Rabbi Herring’s RCA has made conversion more strict and difficult in the last two years, through an agreement the group reached with the Israeli Chief Rabbinate.

“Admit you’re changing the standards,” he said to Rabbi Herring noting: “The new RCA standards exclude a significant number of Orthodox converts who could have converted five or 10 years ago.” 

Rabbi Herring insisted that it was “a canard, false and untrue to say that RCA standards are more severe” than in the past. He said the group’s guidelines in the early 1990s were more strict, and that what the RCA has done now is take the existing guidelines and standardize them so as to increase conversions. He said there were more conversions in the last year and a half (150) than any previous 18-month period, and that another 200 conversions “are in the pipeline.”

Moderator Steven M. Cohen, a sociologist of American Jewry, wisely prevented the program from becoming a narrow debate, and defused several tense moments during the evening with displays of humor.

But all agreed the topic is critical and has an impact on the very notion of Jewish unity.
Though the RCA has been taken to task by some for complying with the Chief Rabbinate’s demands,

Rabbi Herring had strong words of criticism for the institution, widely blamed for resisting rather than embracing potential converts and raising the bar on religious standards. He said the Chief Rabbinate “has failed” in making observant life welcoming. “They have succeeded in alienating many,” and their actions are “not the North American model we can or should implement.”

After hearing Rabbi Levine speak of how Reform conversions are carried out with an emphasis on Torah learning and a commitment to ethical behavior, within a framework of choice, Rabbi Herring said he was “astounded” to hear that the Reform movement “requires acceptance of the commandments.”

He said he had been led to believe that Reform requirements did not include a commitment to keep the mitzvot.

“We have to be truthful and frank,” he said.

The gray area of the discussion was on the definition of what it means to “accept the yoke of the commandments,” as cited in the Talmud; some Orthodox rabbis insist on a convert’s commitment to keep all of the mitzvot, and the more liberal branches require an assurance to lead an ethical life based on Torah values, but not necessarily each commandment.

Rabbi Levine noted that his Reform movement was responsible for most American conversions, and he offered an impassioned explanation of why basing a child’s Jewishness on patrilineal descent, the Reform standard, is consistent with Jewish history. He said that if Rabbi Herring’s standards were required, “we would be a vestigial people,” adding that when “you tell the vast majority [of potential converts] ‘you’re not up to our standards,’ the next generation won’t give a damn.”

Rabbi Hauptman, who at one point during the program mock-complained that she felt “left out” as the only panelist “not under attack,” offered an analogy between conversion standards and Passover cuisine.

She said her family preferred a specific commercial brand of matzah while others only ate shmurah matzah. 

“Shmurah is fine, but that doesn’t mean my brand isn’t up to standards,” she insisted, noting that “if the Orthodox want to add additional restrictions” to conversion, “let them fight it out, but I am walking the path of Jewish law.”

At the close of the evening, the panelists sounded a call for action, recognizing, as Rabbi Herring said, that the key question was how to solve denominational differences “in a way that does not diminish us — how do we live with our differences and not compromise our beliefs” since “we all need each other desperately.”

Rabbi Hauptman posed the notion of all girls going to the mikveh before bat mitzvah and all couples doing the same before marriage so as to level the standards of Jewish practice in a non-judgmental way. 

She said that if rabbis across the religious spectrum sought to “hammer out common standards, we can do something about it, like we did sitting on this panel tonight.”

She is right, of course, but such efforts have been attempted before, most notably in Denver several decades ago when rabbis of each denomination formed a bet din, or religious court, together and sought uniform standards. It performed 750 conversions between 1978 and 1983, but came to an end when the Reform movement approved patrilineal descent, breaking with longstanding tradition and increasing the divide.

Other similar efforts, including the 1997 Neeman Committee proposal in Israel, have failed as the result of pressure from the right on Orthodox rabbis not to participate.

Will the threat of a permanent fissure within a shrinking Jewish community compel the leaders of the different denominations to try again, putting unity above ideology? Based on past experience, it’s difficult to be optimistic. But the looming alternative to such action is a fractured and increasingly alienated group that can no longer even call itself a community. 

We can only urge our religious leaders to solve this crisis, or in one last act of togetherness, suffer the consequences. 

E-mail: Gary@jewishweek.org

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What Do You Stand For?: An Appreciation of Aleksandr Solzhenytsin

I think I was 16 or 17 or so when I picked up the first volume of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago. I ultimately read all three volumes, but it took me several years to do so, thick as the writing was. I still have the yellowed paperbacks in my library. I picked up that first volume after my high school literature class read A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch. I don't remember exactly what the attraction was, though it was clear from Denisovitch that concentration camps did not die with the Nazis. I thought it was unbelievable that gulags or labor camps could exist at the same time I did. It also had something to do with the fact that at around that time, I was madly in love with a Russian girl, Irina, whose family escaped Odessa; she loved blue jeans and Pink Floyd. I was interested in why she would want to leave her country as I could never believe that I would have to leave mine for the same reasons. I became fascinated with the fatalistic sense of humor that she had, and which I found out later that most Russians shared and which, I determined, I, too, shared. After all, it was my grandfather Mandel Shiner who had fled Eastern Europe (Galicia) to avoid being conscripted (they were in for 25 years, thank you very much) into the czar's army, so I wanted to see for myself what kind of society had taken the place of the one that was so hostile to Jews in particular. We shared a disaffection for large organizations such as, for example, the KGB. As Jews, we are a "low church", which is to say that our religion is very decentralized, unlike, for example, the Catholic Church, whose base is located in the Vatican. Jews are by and large free thinkers, even if all the thought that comes out isn't of the highest quality.

Thus began my love affair with Russian literature and life in the Soviet Union in general. I remember reading loads of Dostoyevsky - The Idiot - Prince Myshkin haunts me still - as well as The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment as well as accounts of life behind the iron curtain by Hedrick Smith, who wrote a book entitled, aptly enough, The Russians. There was Chekov's "Uncle Vanya" and "The Cherry Tree" and Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago, all of which I am sure contributed mightily to my sense of social melancholy and appreciation of irony and love of contradiction that I carry with me to this day.

I was obssessed with the Gulag Archipelago. There was something slightly revolutionary about reading a memoir that had to be smuggled out of the country of its origin. It was forbidden fruit, if you want, and this fact gave it an aura of immediacy and intensity. I read with horror at the things for which Stalin and his successors, Krushchev and Brezhnev could send social misfits on a permanent vacation in Siberia or worse. While I'd studied the Holocaust, it hadn't occurred to me that, in its own way, the Russians had endured their own holocaust, too; and what was so frightening is the feeling I had that it was still going on - people being sent away for speaking their minds, doing what they wanted - all the things that we Americans took (and still very much take) for granted.

Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, but did not go to Stockholm because he was afraid that the Soviet authorities would refuse him re-entry into the country that he adored and which consumed him. His acceptance address was widely circulated (a feat in pre-internet days)smuggled out no doubt in false bottomed suitcases or cleared through exit inspections with not a little bribery. As part of his acceptance, 'he wrote that while an ordinary man was obliged “not to participate in lies,” artists had greater responsibilities. “It is within the power of writers and artists to do much more: to defeat the lie!”' http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/04/books/04solzhenitsyn.html?ref=europe#

Solzhenytsin died at the age of 89. He knew well personal tragedy that was of his own making. He could not abide the lie. He paid dearly for principle. Which is why his life and his death, whose nearness he was not afraid of, is so remarkable and speaks so loudly to me today. Deported from the Soviet Union in 1974, he moved to the US and established a residence in Vermont, as I recall, but never stopped, not for a minute, "trying to defeat the lie." As much as he was a thorn in the side of Soviet Authorities, he was likewise as brutally honest at what he perceived to be the lies that the West was and remains possessed of and which continues to feed us today: materialism, narcissism, nihilism and the rest of the usual suspect isms. Through it all, he remained a Russian and in 1994 he left the US to return to Russia after the fall of Communism. He was a Russian.

This was a man who stood for something: as a man, he did not want to participate in the lie. As an artist, he fought and was punished horribly for trying to defeat them.

What are we Americans of whatever persuasion to learn from Solzhenytsin's life and death? We need only review the catastrophe of a government and social structure that we in the US have allowed to exist in this country to see that we have all collectively participated in the lies and the actions based on them.

I am currently reading a general history of the events of 1968 by Mark Kurlansky, entitled, aptly enough again, 1968. To imagine that young people in this country were so enraged against what they correctly viewed as a racist, imperialistic society and government that they would take to the streets seems impossible today to even think about. Sure, there have been protests, but they have been muted. To imagine students in Paris and across Europe protesting their societies and governments from behind and in front of barricades, fighting with police seems quaint in today's world. To imagine that the Prague Spring could occur today is an absurd notion, is it not? Americans in 1968 drove Lyndon Johnson out of the White House, but caused the rise of the paranoid right, embodied in Richard Nixon and his intellectual progeny. In 1968, there were, according to some quick research, about 35,000 American dead in Vietnam. Over the course of the next five years, until the last helicopter left the US Embassy in Saigon, another 23,000 Americans would die. http://www.archives.gov/research/vietnam-war/casualty-statistics.html

It's evident that in 2008, too many Americans are afraid to stand for anything out of fear of being "politically incorrect". Or a fear of being branded as "unpatriotic" or "un-American". Or who are so deeply invested in lies that to fight them means self-destruction. Those who do stand up are as ostracized as much as is possible in a country that thankfully runs only one set of detention facilities, that being in Guantanamo, Cuba. The lies that we have become too comfortable living with arise out of fear not of being politically incorrect, but what political incorrectness means to our lives if words spur action: the loss of business opportunities, income and social standing. Look around you: how are people who question the system in this country treated? With disdain, hatred and derision. Look at what happened to Cindy Sheehan some years back when she went very public in her condemnation of the war in Iraq before that, too, became politically correct. She was painted as a psychiatric patient. There are other examples, but hers pops to mind immediately. We have, all of us, become participants in the lie; we are all "Good Germans", as I wrote in this space some time ago.

We can look back on Solzhenitsyn's life and body of work and see clearly what he stood for. I do not know where you stand in your life's chronology, but in mine, I've come to the age where, unlike some of my contemporaries who have given up or who are just bored or who think that they do not matter any more, it is thanks in some consciously inexplicable part to my love affair with Russian literature and history that I do what I can to stand for something other than the notion of "getting along" just to get along. What that something is is a work in progress, but it is, I hope, not nothing as with too many people I am too well acquainted with these days. Character traits and actions demonstrating commitment, honor, loyalty, integrity, kindness, trustworthiness or dare I say faith, are not things that any of us should be afraid of but which, unfortunately owing to the social consequences of doing so to the extent we might in our daily lives, we are. Which is not to say that I am perfect, and if I seem as though I am lecturing, rest assured that the lecture is largely self-directed and aspirational.

It is a waste of a person's life to not stand for anything. Too many people go through the motions of life, standing for nothing, running on a tank empty of meaning, caring not a whit if they leave a legacy of which they can be proud, a legacy that is larger than they are as mere humans. Inside all of us is the ability to transcend ourselves in order to give meaning to the world and to truth and then only incidentally yet naturally to ourselves. It is the striving for meaning in a world that defies it that gives us what we call our humanity, and without it, we are not fully human.

If there is one thing that I want to leave my son, it's the notion that, like Solzhenytsin, you cannot participate in the lie. And because he is an artist, it's his responsibility, according to Solzhenytsin, to defeat those lies wherever he can and to be proud to know that there is a truth out there somewhere that everyone knows; it's just a matter of how we individually and collectively choose to distort it that makes the lies possible. On second thought, I will have to differ somewhat with Solzhenytsin: to the extent that living is itself an art - G-d knows it is not science - we all have an obligation to put the truth out there for all to see; we all have an obligation to defeat the lies that we know are lies but which, in the battle, might somehow inconvenience us or cost us money or worse. Is that too high a price for our souls? How much does personal integrity cost?

As Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet: "to be or not to be - that is the question". Will we choose to "be" like Solzhenytsin or will we choose to "be" participants in the lie? That is the question of our age.

Randy Shiner

"Network": Deja Vu All Over Again

I am watching the film "Network" which was broadcast the other day on HDNet, Mark Cuban's TV station. I am convinced that he must have a hand in the programming, as "Network" is like watching (thanks to Yogi Berra) deja vu all over again.

It was prescient in that most everything that was thought to be satire in 1976 has come to reality. The bastardization, commercialization and propagandization of the news in this country is apparently complete, according to 1976 absurdists who were responsible for "Network", primarily Paddy Chayefsky, who wrote the screenplay.

When Howard Beale - a fictional character whose contemporaries were Walter Cronkite, Harry Reasoner and Eric Sevareid -- is thought to have a mental illness when he announces that he is going to commit suicide on the air in a week, Faye Dunaway's character, ("Diana Christensen") sees a chance to bring UBS' evening news out of the ratings cellar, and turns Beale into a visionary prophet - a messiah - whose mission is the condemnation of the bullshit that he admits he has been spewing for the past 11 years as anchor for the UBS evening news. He does not deliver the news; he is on a mission. Robert Duvall goes along, until Beale starts inveighing against the Saudi Arabian purchase of the ginormous corporation that owns UBS. Alas, Saudi Arabia is owed $2 billion so they are not terribly keen on having their financial deals sullied by the likes of Howard Beale.

The funniest part is the Angela Davis - like character that is introduced to the mix as "an angry Communist n****r" who is given a show called "The Mao-Tse Tung Hour". Cut to a meeting of the local Communist party central committee going through a distribution agreement so that UBS can film the criminal activities of the "Ecumenical Liberation Army" who supplies UBS with live footage of bank heists that they commit and which is used by UBS to boost its ratings, damn the federal criminal conspiracy charges. Journalism first! Protect those sources!

"The world is a business and has been since man crawled out of the slime." So says Ned Beatty ("Arthur Jensen") to Beale to tell him that Business is an ecumenical holding company for everything and that nations and states do not exist. (Makes me wonder whether this film was the uncredited parent of "The Matrix". It could be argued that big corporations exist in a parallel universe to that of people like me who think that they actually have freedom of choice or that votes really matter.)

By the end, Beale is howling about the end of democracy, saying that "the individual is finished". Beale starts the beginning of the end by starting to preach the death and decay of society and the conversion of people into humanoids, devoid of feeling and sensitivity to real pleasure and pain.

At the end of the film , Network bigwigs are dissecting the 18-34 demographic and syndication potential in figuring out whether to keep or fire Howard Beale. All discussion is just about money. In the end, they plot to have the Maoists kill Beale because of the ratings drag he'll end up being. And kill him they do, right on the air, for having lousy ratings.

The film won three best acting awards and was nominated for Best Picture in 1976.

The Return of Jewish Dead - Regev and Goldwasser

I love how Israeli Jews, especially those in the West Bank, get all self-righteous about the return of bodies of IDF soldiers in exchange for 200 dead Hezbollah and five live terrorists including Samir Kuntar, whose acts when he was 17 remain outrageous offenses.

If Israel is going to maintain mandatory enlistments at the age of 18, the social contract that the IDF has with the people to bring them all back dead or alive, must remain sacrosanct and beyond religious or political ideology. Israel and Jews should not be comparing the "deal" that they got with Hezbollah.

To compare the lives of Regev and Goldwasser with the rabble that were returned is an insult to Jewish dead. the IDF has an obligation to bring those soldiers home so that every other soldier or soldier-in-waiting knows that regardless of whether they live or die in the service, the state of Israel is and will do what is necessary to give them back to their families and the country whose principles and existence they fought and died to defend. The rest of the calculations are the equivalent of dancing to the enemies tune. Israel dances to its own music, not that of others.

The argument that this deal with Hezbollah will encourage further "kidnappings" is almost laughable. Do you think for a second that IDF soldiers are not going to put up a vicious fight to prevent the kidnappings from occurring? They aren't just going to stand there and give up. They are going to fight like hell to avoid being taken prisoner, just as every other soldier does. And in that fight, that soldier knows that his country will do what it takes to get him home, dead or alive. Besides which, I am sure that Israel did not give back all of the bodies of Hezbollah fighters, did it? As much as IDF and Israel wants its citizen-soldiers back, Hezbollah probably isn't too keen on having its dead in Jewish hands. It is a sad situation all around, no doubt, but everyone knew this day was coming. They knew (or had very strong indications) that Regev and Goldwasser were dead awhile ago.

Pity that it's only today that the government put up a video on youtube about the crimes of Samir Kuntar. This should have been done some time ago and it is disappointing that Israel did not attempt to control the media spin on the release of the prisoners and terrorists. There should have been a more concerted effort to tell the world and diaspora Jewry why exactly Israel would accept two bodies in exchange for what it gave up in return, and why, according to the Israeli calculus, getting its soldiers back, dead or alive, is priority number one.

Explained properly in the right media and with enough frequency, Israel might have scored a media victory by comparing what Israelis do with what its enemies do. Israel mourns its dead. Nasrallah holds "victory" celebrations. In the end, Israel must satisfy itself that it did the right thing, without regard to what it had to give up in order to do so. Doing the right thing for its citizens and soldiers in order to preserve the social contract is fundamental and should never, in the final analysis, sacrificed on the altar of religious politics.

Randy Shiner

More WHINING - INDYMAC FAILS - OR, Chicken Little Who?

View from the Booth:

It really is FUBAR or, if you'd rather not think about the first word: MUBAR (Messed) Up Beyond All Recognition. And this is not a "liberal v conservative" thing. This is an American thing. Past does not count except as a warning. We need some new discussion in this country.

Who will be left standing when the music finally does stop? Thank God I have my health, more or less. Put on some John Lee Hooker. Boomboomboom,uh huh.....

Randy Shiner



In the biggest bank failure of the housing downturn to date, federal banking regulators today closed IndyMac Bank FSB, naming the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. as conservator.

The FDIC said it will transfer insured deposits and "substantially all the assets" of IndyMac Bank, to a newly created successor, IndyMac Federal Bank, which will be operated by the FDIC.

Insured depositors and borrowers will automatically become customers of IndyMac Federal, FSB and will continue to have uninterrupted customer service and access to their funds by ATM, debit cards and writing checks. Depositors of IndyMac Federal Bank FSB will have no access to online and phone banking services this weekend, but will regain access to them on Monday.

IndyMac was one of the nation's largest independent mortgage lenders, and had been hard hit by delinquencies and foreclosures. Parent company IndyMac Bancorp Inc. announced Monday that it was no longer considered "well capitalized" by regulators and had stopped making most mortgage loans (see story).

In a statement, OTS Director John Reich said the immediate cause of the closing of IndyMac Bank FSB was a run on deposits that began when a June 26 letter Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., sent to federal bank regulators voicing concerns about the thrift's "financial deterioration" was made public. Schumer said IndyMac posed "significant risks to both taxpayers and borrowers" (see story).

In the 11 business days following the public release the letter, Reich said depositors withdrew more than $1.3 billion from their accounts.

“This institution failed today due to a liquidity crisis,” Reich said. “Although this institution was already in distress, I am troubled by any interference in the regulatory process.”

OTS said IndyMac is the largest thrift it regulates to fail and according to FDIC data is the second largest financial institution to close in U.S. history.

IndyMac Bank, FSB had total assets of $32.01 billion and total deposits of $19.06 billion as of March 31, including about $1 billion of potentially uninsured deposits held by approximately 10,000 depositors. The FDIC will begin contacting customers with uninsured deposits to arrange an appointment with an FDIC claims agent by Monday.

The FDIC will pay uninsured depositors an advance dividend equal to 50 percent of the uninsured amount. Based on preliminary analysis, the estimated cost of the resolution to the Deposit Insurance Fund is between $4 billion and $8 billion.

In a statement, American Bankers Association president Edward Yingling called it "a sad day for IndyMac" but said insured depositors "should know that their money is safe. The FDIC insurance fund is huge, with more than $52 billion in assets to protect bank depositors. In this year alone, the fund will add an additional $5 billion from assessments on banks and interest earnings."

The FDIC said IndyMac Bank is the fifth FDIC-insured failure of the year. The last FDIC-insured failure in California was the Southern Pacific Bank, Torrance, on Feb. 7, 2003.

The FDIC has established a toll-free number for customers of IndyMac Federal Bank, FSB. The toll-free number is 1-866-806-5919 and will operate today from 3 p.m. to 9 p.m. (PDT), and then daily from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. thereafter, except Sunday, July 13, when the hours will be 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Customers also may visit the FDIC's Web site at http://www.fdic.gov/bank/individual/failed/IndyMac.html for further information.

***

Raging Bull - A Nation of Whiners?

No, I am not referring to Jake LaMotta's fights with Sugar Ray Robinson or Marcel Cerdan. I am referring to the load of raging bull coming out of the mouths of those who would pretend to the office of the Presidency of the United States.

Reports and video that I have seen of former Senator and UBS (presently under investigation for helping rich people stash money away in Zurich) lobbyist Phil Gramm have come out in which he says that the U.S. is a nation of "whiners". In about five seconds, the economic adviser to John McCain was, to use present day political parlance, thrown under the bus. But did Gramm lay down between the tires of the "Straight Talk Express" while it was passing over him?

Phil Gramm uttered the same thing as John McCain did when he, McCain, admitted that the idea of a "gas tax holiday" was merely a gimmick designed to quench the thirst of Americans for gas, whose price per gallon and pump pain is also completely a figment of everyone's imagination - a "mental thing". According to Mr. McCain, anyway. It almost makes sense to cut the price of oil by .18 cents in order to allow more money to go to countries whose rulers fund terrorism designed to destroy our way of life. Our thirst for oil is nothing less than suicidal or at best self-defeating.

This is the same Phil Gramm whose long stint in the Senate included assisting companies like Enron, whose energy traders caused rolling blackouts across California several years ago and who helped to pass the "Enron loophole" to make energy futures exempt from scrutiny by the CFTC (Commodity Futures Trading Corporation) which has today made oil in addition to a commodity but also a financial instrument and which has added dollars to the cost of a gallon of gas, regardless of the fact that the OPEC cartel has held down production of oil in order to keep prices high in light of negatively inelastic demand. The rest of the world wants to live like Americans circa 1985. And the more they are successful, the more energy they are using (not to mention the impact on the environment - Dickensian China?). It is the road to global ruin.

What does it say about a candidate for President when his chief economic advisor says that the recession we are in is all in our collective heads? Who exactly is out of touch with reality here? Driven solely by the bottom line of quarterly earnings reports to help with market analysts' expectations and recommendations, Mr. Gramm and Mr. McCain are the ones who are really out of touch with ordinary Americans. Mr. Gramm and Mr. McCain are apparently only in touch with the corporations that, whether we like to admit it or not, run this country.

Are they not reading about mass layoffs all over the world? Siemens of Germany - and Germans do not, as a rule, get excited about things -- is laying off 16,500 workers worldwide. Do Mr. McCain and Mr. Gramm think that difficult global economic circumstances are in the figments of the imaginations of the directors of Siemens? That Siemens is whining, too?

It's lovely that Mrs. McCain donates the use of the company plane (or whatever the arrangement is) to the McCain campaign so that Mr. McCain does not have to unduly burden himself with ordinary commercial air travel. He does not have to worry about airlines which are going broke by the minute because of the price of jet fuel. He does not have to worry about shelling out money to check a bag. And it certainly doesn't concern his wife to have to fill up the brauhaus' company Cessna Citation Excel. It's all deductible, though it amounts to a subsidy for the McCain campaign, at the very least. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/us/politics/27plane.html

Perhaps Mr. McCain would like to stop for a second and consider that in 1972, the fuel budget for the Department of Defense was 1.2% of the total defense budget. According to figures I heard from Dr. Robert Zubrin, the fuel budget for the Department of Defense in 2007 was 52.4% of the entire defense budget. By 2010, based on current trends, the fuel budget for the Defense Department will be over 100%. That means no money for guns. No money for planes. No money for replacement parts. No money for training new troops or retention of current ones. This is not in somoneone's imagination. These are real numbers. The notion that this country's, nay, the world's economic woes (outside, of course, India, China, and the rest of the usual list of suspects)is the result of some mental deficiency on the part of the American public is an insult to our collective intelligence. Those in power would have those out of power believe that there is something wrong with the "have-nots". Otherwise, given the amazing system that people like Mr. Gramm and Mr. McCain and like thinkers have built, how could there possibly be any have-nots whatsoever? According to these people, the system is fine, so there must, ab initio be something wrong with us.

The problem is not that America is a nation of whiners. On the contrary, whining is not part of the Protestant work-ethic on which this country was founded. The problem is that people did not whine loud enough before the sky began to fall.

George H. W. Bush, in the 1980 Republican Primaries, called Reaganomics "voodoo economics". He was absolutely right. The notion that if you give the wealthy loads of tax breaks that this will spur investment whose benefits will "trickle down" to the rest of society has proved to be exactly the fiction that Bush pére warned against. The results of that fiction, however, are painfully very real to the vast majority of Americans today.

What we are facing right now is the culmination and collapse of voodoo economic theology. The rich have become insanely rich, and the middle class - you remember - the ones who worked on assembly lines in Flint who could afford to buy a house and send their children to well-funded state universities - has been systematically destroyed, with people today just trying to keep the electricity from being turned off. The middle class has been redefined, wiped out of existence permanently, unless things drastically change in this country.

The oil problem and larger energy problem in this country is nothing less than a national security issue based on the DOD numbers. In 1952, President Truman attempted to nationalize the steel industry to avert a proposed steelworkers' union strike that would have impacted the US' ability to fight the Korean War. The strike was averted, but the US Supreme Court ruled that such an action was an unconsitutional seizure of private property that was not otherwise allowed by statute.Youngstown Sheet & Tube v. Sawyer 343 U.S. 579; 72 S. Ct. 863; 96 L. Ed. 1153 (1952) In the end, the steel industry was forced to accept exactly what the union had offered four months before the scheduled national shutdown.

I seriously doubt that Mr. Bush will take any drastic actions to avoid further spectacular profits from going to his friends in the oil business, not to mention Mr. Cheney's own carnal ties in that field of endeavor. We can only hope that a President Obama will take a good long look at this situation and make the hard and politically unpopular (at least to the oil and gas lobby and our dear friends the Saudis) choices that need to be made.

In my view, these are worse circumstances than even Harry Truman faced over 50 years ago. The price of oil's impact on the US and world economies -- spiked by the confluence of rising global demand, the OPEC cartel's reduced or steady levels of production, the fall of the dollar used to buy all that oil, and last, the transmutation of oil from a commodity to a financial instrument - Morgan Stanley owns more oil in the Northeastern United States than any other company - has made the very existence of the independence of the US as a soveriegn nation a questionable proposition unless some radical measures are taken to wrest our independence away from oil and the people who control its flow into this country.

The national priority right now needs to be the total destruction of OPEC. The "war on terror" begins there. And I am talking about a war footing in order to do so. For if we do not, and things are allowed to continue ad infinitum as they are now, there will be nothing left of what was once the most powerful nation on earth.

The benefits to the destruction of OPEC are manifold and almost too obvious for explanation. Regardless, it is a maxim that once the flow of money to Wahabbi institutions is cut off from the Western world, we will see, over time, a reduction in radicalism or at least a stemming of its tide. With the reduction in places that teach radicalism will be the marginalization of those insitutions that insist upon terror as a way to stay in power, such as Hamas and Hezbollah, not to mention all the other lesser-known but just as deadly terror groups waging Jihad against Westerners and non-Wahabbi Muslims. There are complicated questions that will still linger even if we were to throw off the bondage of OPEC. But those questions -- e.g., what to do about a resurgent Iran - pale in importance when compared to the idea that we have to have our independence back. Once we have our independence back, we will have our defense credibility and capability back and can then, with some level of reassurance, begin to again confidently assert our national interests globally so that when the US speaks, people will listen, not laugh in our national face.

So what are we to make of Mr. Gramm and his notion that the US is a nation of whiners? Given the gravity of the situation the world is in right now, I cannot see any reason not to whine. But we, as Americans, need to whine much, much louder. I understand now, in the harsh light of national tragedy, how people in the past have called for revolution. Where is Thomas Paine when you need him?*

Randy Shiner


*Right here: http://www.ushistory.org/Paine/commonsense/index.htm

Where I Came From

Suffice it to say that a lot of who I am today is a reflection of the wisdom contained in the mind and heart of Vahness Duncan, the woman I called "Gramma Van" all my life who came to Chicago from the cotton fields of Cotton Plant, Arkansas during the great northern migration after WWII. She raised my sister and I while our mother was out trying to make a living as a single parent in the 1960s and 70s. Trust me when I tell you that I owe her a debt that no money could ever repay. While Mr. Obama was raised by his White Grandparents, I was raised by my Black Grandmother. We all have a story.

Randy Shiner

Proud atheists - America's Brainiest Jewish (Atheist) Couple Speak

Ultimately, I wonder how people as smart as this can ever be happy if they always look for proofs and rationality in everything that they do. And if, as they admit, scientists cannot explain everything, it is a little odd how they can so proudly and affirmatively state that "there is no God" as atheists must do. I wonder how the Jewish sages try to explain, if they do, the existence of God. While Pinker and Goldstein are certainly brilliant (I have several of their books) the question of whether there is or is not a God (and they are atheists, which means that they have decided that there is no God) is not something that is provable by logic or mathematics. We are interested in the attempts to prove or disprove God because we are interested in attempts to prove what we take as a matter of faith. These people can talk until they are blue in the face, but at some point, they run into the logical problem of reductio ad absurdum -- reducing something to its lowest, absurd point. How, for example, do you explain exactly how life was originally formed on earth? Scientists will tell you that there was a soupy broth that produced the first life-forms as we understand it. I accept that as a matter of scientific proof. But where and how did the soupy broth come from? There is no explaining that and it is an article of faith with me that it appeared in separate forms by God's hand, just as does the sun create a beautiful scene every morning and every night. I am afraid that brainiacs like Pinker and Goldstein are so busy trying to prove that what they see has a reason or must somehow, even theoretically, be observable they miss the unknowable beauty of the awesomeness of a sunset. One fundamental question arises for me: How do the Jewish sages or do current Jewish thinkers deal with the exactitude which scientific analysis has brought to bear on the issue of the origins of existence and life? While I have frankly accepted God as a matter of faith, I would like to know how Jews perceive and think about the ultimate source of our existence and meaning.

Randy Shiner



Proud atheists
Steven Pinker and Rebecca Goldstein, America's brainiest couple, confess that belonging to one of America's most reviled subcultures doesn't mean they believe scientists can explain everything.
By Steve Paulson

Oct. 15, 2007 | "I've always been obsessed with the mind-body problem," says philosopher Renee Feuer Himmel. "It's the essential problem of metaphysics, about both the world out there and the world in here."

Renee is the fictional alter ego of novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein. In her 1983 novel, "The Mind-Body Problem," Goldstein laid out her own metaphysical concerns, which include the mystery of consciousness and the struggle between reason and emotion. As a novelist, she's drawn to the quirky lives of scientists and philosophers. She's also fascinated by history's great rationalist thinkers. She's written nonfiction accounts of the 17th-century Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza and the 20th-century mathematician-philosopher Kurt Gödel.

Perhaps it's not surprising that Goldstein would end up living with Steven Pinker, a leading theorist of the mind. He's a cognitive psychologist at Harvard; she's a philosopher who's taught at several colleges. Although they come out of different disciplines, they mine much of the same territory: language, consciousness, and the tension between science and religion. If Boston is ground zero for intellectuals, then Pinker and Goldstein must rank as one of America's brainiest power couples.

With a series of bestselling books on language and human nature, including "How the Mind Works," Pinker has emerged as his generation's most influential cognitive theorist. His work on the evolution of language, and how humans possess an innate capacity for language, revolutionized linguistics. His writing about the nature/nurture debate helped shift prevailing thinking away from seeing human nature as a blank slate.

Pinker and Goldstein share a basic philosophical outlook, but I discovered that their views diverge somewhat when it comes to the "science and religion" debate. In a wide-ranging joint interview, we talked about animals and language, atheism and astrology, Iraq and faith, and their most recent books, Goldstein's "Betraying Spinoza" and Pinker's "The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature."

Steve, do you think language is what makes our species unique? Is this the defining trait of human beings?

PINKER: It's certainly one of the distinctive traits of Homo sapiens. But I don't think language could have evolved if it was the only distinctive trait. It goes hand in hand with our ability to develop tools and technologies, and also with the fact that we cooperate with nonrelatives. I think this triad -- language, social cooperation and technological know-how -- is what makes humans unusual. And they probably evolved in tandem, each of them multiplying the value of the other two.

You have a fascinating observation in your new book about causation. You say the way we construct sentences, particularly verbs, has a lot to do with how we understand cause and effect.

PINKER: That's right. For example, if John grabs the doorknob and pulls the door open, we say, "John opened the door." If John opens the window and a breeze pushes the door open, we don't say, "John opened the door." We say something like, "What John did caused the door to open." We use that notion of causation in assigning responsibility. So all of those crazy court cases that happen in real life and are depicted on "Law and Order," where you have to figure out if the person who pulled the trigger was really responsible for the death of the victim, tap into the same model of causation.

I talk about the case of James Garfield, who was felled by an assassin's bullet, but lingered on his deathbed for three months and eventually succumbed to an infection because of the hare-brained practices of his inept doctors. At the trial of the murderer, the accused assassin said, "I just shot him. The doctors killed him." The jury disagreed and he went to the gallows. It's an excellent case of how the notion of direct causation is very much on our minds as we assign moral and legal responsibility.

Rebecca, you've written a great deal about competing philosophical theories of language. Do you think our mind can function apart from language? Or does language define our reality?

GOLDSTEIN: Obviously, much of our thinking is being filtered through language. But it's always seemed to me that there has to be an awful lot of thinking that's done prior to the acquisition of language. And I often have trouble translating my thoughts into language. I think about that a lot. It often seems to me that the thoughts are there and some words are flitting through my mind when I'm thinking. So there's something very separate between thinking and language. But that might vary from mind to mind.

As a novelist, this must be something you think about.

GOLDSTEIN: Very much so. My novels begin with a sense of the book, a sense of the place, and then I have to find the language that does justice to it. Strangely, I find that in my philosophical work as well. And in math; I've done a lot of math. I have the intuition, I'll see it, and then I have to translate it into language. So I've always had a keen sense that thought does not require language.

What do you make of the language studies of various animals -- for instance, the bonobo Kanzi, who's learned to piece together simple sentences by pressing lexigrams. Is that real language?

PINKER: It isn't a scientific question whether something is real language. That's really a question of how far you want to extend the word "language." I think the scientific question is: Are the chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas who are trained by humans doing something that's fundamentally the same as what children are doing when they first acquire language? I suspect they are quite different. You need experimenters hell-bent on training chimpanzees, whereas with children, you can't help but acquire a language if you're a child in a human community. Indeed, children thrown together in a community that doesn't have a language of its own will invent one in order to communicate with each other. And while it's impressive that chimps have been trained to learn a few dozen or even a couple hundred symbols or signs, the ability to combine them is quite rudimentary and forced.

You each dedicated your most recent books to each other, and I'm curious about how your relationship has influenced your work. You've both written about language and human nature, about religion and the power of reason. Do you talk about these things around the dinner table?

GOLDSTEIN: [Laughs.] Yes, there's no way around it. Our work spills over into our lives, and our lives spill over into our work.

PINKER: But that's not the only thing we talk about.

Would you say your common interests are partly what brought you together?

GOLDSTEIN: Oh yes, completely. Actually, we met through each other's work. I was a great fan of Steve's work. And then I discovered that he had cited me in one of his books. It was my unusual use of an irregular verb. So it was completely through our work and my tremendous interest in Steve's work that we first came to know each other. I don't know if I should say this, but when I first met Steve in the flesh, I said that the way he thinks had so completely changed the way I think -- particularly what I had learned from him about cognitive psychology and evolutionary psychology -- that I said, "I don't think I've had my mind so shaken up by any thinker since [18th-century philosopher] David Hume." And he very modestly said, "That can't be the case." But it was the case. So I can certainly say that Steve has profoundly influenced the way I think.

PINKER: I've certainly been influenced by Rebecca as well. Our connection isn't just that we met through an irregular verb, which sounds like the ultimate literary romance of two nerds finding each other. [Goldstein laughs.] Rebecca as a philosopher is a strong defender of realism -- the idea that there is a real world that we can come to know --which emboldened me to press that theme in my own writings, even though people often say that we just construct reality through language. And the topic of consciousness -- how the mind emerges from the body, and what makes the three-pound organ that we call the brain actually experience things subjectively -- is a theme that runs through both my nonfiction and Rebecca's fiction and her philosophical writings.

Do you show each other your articles and books as you're writing them?

GOLDSTEIN: Yes, we've each seen each other's work in early drafts and in the final work. But this is the first time I've ever shared my work with anybody while it's happening. I'm very private about my work. So this has been a very new experience for me. Now I'm wondering how I ever wrote any books without having Steve read them.

Are you very open in your criticisms and suggestions about each other's work?

PINKER: Very much. But we're not brutal.

GOLDSTEIN: We can be brutal. [Laughs.] Sweetly brutal.

PINKER: But yes, we each say, "This isn't working. This joke isn't funny. I don't think your readers are going to understand what you're trying to get at here."

Rebecca, the dedication in your Spinoza book reads, "For Steve, despite Spinoza." Can you explain that?

GOLDSTEIN: Spinoza wasn't a great fan of romantic love. He didn't think that the life of reason had any place for romantic love. And Spinoza's methodology is strictly reductive. He tries to prove everything, starting with definitions and axioms. And he has this rigorous proof that romantic love will always end badly.

Does that mean he did not experience romantic love himself?

GOLDSTEIN: He didn't, as far as we know. There are some rumors about his landlady's daughter, who went to another young man when he gave her a pearl necklace. But no, Spinoza's view about love is all directed toward love of truth and God and nature. It's not directed toward another person. To love another person is to want desperately for them to reciprocate. And that's not something we have complete control over. Therefore, it's irrational. He argues that romantic love just increases your fragility and vulnerability and therefore you ought not to do it.

In your book on Spinoza, you talk about your own religious education in an orthodox Jewish school, and how Spinoza was trotted out by one of your teachers as precisely the kind of heretical thinker that good Jewish girls should avoid. But this seemed to make you especially interested in him. Why do you still like Spinoza so much?

GOLDSTEIN: It's interesting. It's almost like there are two different Spinozas. And I really didn't bring them together until I wrote the book. At my very orthodox all-girls high school, Spinoza was presented to us as a kind of cautionary tale: This is what can go wrong if you ask the wrong questions. I was in a school that discouraged one from even going on to college. And philosophy was absolutely the worst thing you could study because it does ask you to question everything. Then there was the Spinoza I came in contact with when I was a professional philosopher. Spinoza is a metaphysician of a very extravagant sort. He wants to deduce everything through pure reason. And that was a kind of philosopher that I was also taught to dismiss and disdain. So both sides of my training -- the orthodox Jewish training, the analytic philosophy training -- pushed me to dismiss Spinoza.

I also like the grandeur of his ambition. He really does believe that we can save ourselves through being rational. And I believe in that. I believe that if we have any hope at all, it's through trying to be rigorously objective about ourselves and our place in the world. We have to do that. We have to submit ourselves to objectivity, to rationality. I think that's what it is about Spinoza. He's just such a rationalist.

Spinoza certainly dismissed the religion he'd been exposed to. Do both of you consider yourselves atheists?

[pause] GOLDSTEIN: Yes.

PINKER: Yes.

GOLDSTEIN: Proud atheists.

PINKER: There, we said it. [Laughs.]

So you have to hesitate for a moment before you use that dirty word?

PINKER: Atheists are the most reviled minority in the United States, so it's no small matter to come out and say it.

I find it puzzling how the recent atheist manifestos by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens have all turned into bestsellers in a country that's overwhelmingly religious. According to various polls, half of all Americans believe the Bible is the literal truth. A recent Newsweek poll found that 91 percent believe in God. How do you explain the enormous popularity of these books?

PINKER: Part of it is that the people who buy books -- at least that kind of highbrow trade book -- are not a random sample of the population. The opinions sampled by these polls are probably soft. When people are asked a question, they don't just turn a flashlight into their data bank of beliefs and read out what they see. When people say, "Yes, I believe in God and the Bible," they're kind of saying, "I'm a moral person. I have solidarity with the community of churchgoers that I was brought up in and that I currently belong to." I think that if you were to probe a lot of people's religious opinions, they would not be as religious as the numbers would suggest.

GOLDSTEIN: It would be fascinating, though, to see a poll of the people who are buying the new atheist books and see how they are answering these questions.

PINKER: Well, the question often arises whether these authors are preaching to the choir. Especially since these books make no concessions toward religious sensibilities. It's a full-throated intellectual assault on the concept of God. My sense is that the books are really not aimed at the 91 percent of the people you cited who believe in God, but rather at some minority of people who are wavering, who've been brought up in a religious way but now have some private doubts. They perhaps think that confessing to being an atheist is like confessing to being a child molester. So they're not willing to even think those thoughts. Then they come across a book that seems to vindicate all of their doubts. And that tortured minority of reflective, analytic people from a religious background -- perhaps like Rebecca from her religious background -- are who the books are aimed at. Julia Sweeney's one-woman show, "Letting Go of God," would be representative of the kind of person whose mind could be changed by a book like that.

Steve, you recently waded into the controversy over Harvard's proposal to require all undergraduates to take a course called "Reason and Faith." The plan was dropped after you and other critics strongly opposed it. But the people who supported it say that every college graduate should have a basic understanding of religion because it's such a powerful cultural and political force around the world. Don't they have a point?

PINKER: I think students should know something about religion as a historical phenomenon, in the same way that they should know something about socialism and humanism and the other great ideas that have shaped political philosophies and therefore the course of human events. I didn't like the idea of privileging religion above other ideologies that were also historically influential, like socialism and capitalism. I also didn't like the euphemism "faith." Nor did I like the juxtaposition of "faith" and "reason," as if they were just two alternative ways of knowing.

One of your critics in this controversy is Stephen Prothero, a religious studies professor at Boston University, who wrote the book "Religious Literacy." He said, "You can be a very smart person and be very dumb when it comes to religion. Professor Pinker just doesn't get it." Prothero says we have to understand religion to come to grips with hot-button issues like abortion, stem cell research and gay rights. And he says Iraq is such a mess right now because our leaders in Washington just didn't understand a basic fact about Islam before they launched the war -- that Sunnis and Shiites hate each other.

PINKER: I think religion is one of the things you have to understand. But the situation in Iraq is not primarily a theological one. There are just as fierce battles among the various tribes and militias, clans and nationalities. So it's not just a Shiite-Sunni dispute. The mistake was not being ignorant of religion. The mistake was being ignorant of all aspects of Iraqi society, including family structure, local history, the evolutionary psychology of kinship and how it reinforces ties of family and clan and kin in Iraq in a way that differs from countries that we're more familiar with. So religion should be part of it. But I don't see why, of all of the forces that go into history -- military, economic, sociological, evolutionary, psychological -- religion itself should be privileged.

GOLDSTEIN: It depends on what you mean by understanding religion. Obviously, religion is a tremendously powerful influence in history. But I have to say -- and I think this is something that Steve and I disagree on -- I do worry whether some of the people who are writing the new atheist books understand what it feels like to be a religious person. Do they get what that feels like? I don't want to say that there's only one kind of religious impulse. There are so many different ways of responding to the world that could be called religious -- some of them very expansive and life-embracing, and some of them not. But I think one of the things that made Steve nervous was to pose these two things -- faith and reason, religion and science -- as alternative ways of pursuing truth. In terms of the pursuit of knowledge, faith is not an alternative mode to science and to reason.

PINKER: Exactly. I would be opposed to a requirement on astrology and astronomy, or alchemy and chemistry. Not because I don't think people should know about astrology. Astrology had an important role in the ancient world. You can't understand many things unless you know something about astrology -- the plays of Shakespeare and so on. What I'm opposed to is equating it with reason or science.

But can you really equate religion with astrology, or religion with alchemy? No serious scholar still takes astrology or alchemy seriously. But there's a lot of serious thinking about religion.

PINKER: I would put faith in that same category because faith is believing something without a good reason to believe it. I would put it in the same category as astrology and alchemy.

Those are fighting words!

GOLDSTEIN: [Laughs.] He said it, not me.

Rebecca, where do you come down on this? Obviously, you've moved away from the religious milieu you grew up in. But do you reject it out of hand, as Steve does?

GOLDSTEIN: I do, intellectually. We get into terrible trouble if we believe sloppily, if we let emotions -- and our own view of the way we want the world to be -- shape the way we think the world is. This accounts for a great deal of the madness in the world. So I am completely committed to trying to justify everything, and in that regard, I have very little use for faith. However, I know what it feels like to believe without justification. And we all do it. I mean, I believe my children are the most wonderful children ever born. Of course, most parents feel that way. It's a useful thing, perhaps. Could I justify it? Should I even go about justifying my love for them? There would be something wrong with that. So I have more sympathy toward an emotional reaction to the world and some of the more religious reactions.

Steve, you've written about the need for scholars to investigate what you call "dangerous ideas." For instance, do women have different abilities and emotions than men? Would society be better off if heroin and cocaine were legalized? Let me suggest a dangerous idea not on your list -- the idea that the mind is more than the physical mechanics of the brain, that there might be some aspect of consciousness that goes beyond an individual's brain. Is this a dangerous idea?

PINKER: No. It's an idea that probably the majority of the population believes. The more dangerous idea is what most biologists believe, which is that the mind is the information-processing ability of the brain. In the 19th century, the idea that there's something to consciousness beyond the functioning of the brain was a serious scientific hypothesis. Scientists as distinguished as Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of evolution, and William James, a hero of both Rebecca's and mine, were involved in kitschy, seance-like demonstrations trying to contact the souls of the dead. Those experiments failed. We don't seem to be able to communicate with the great beyond.

But there's some dispute on this history. Deborah Blum just wrote about this in her book "Ghost Hunters." James and other scientists searched for proof of the supernatural, and he discounted the vast majority of these psychics. He dismissed virtually all of them as frauds. But there were a few he couldn't explain away.

GOLDSTEIN: Yeah, his Mrs. Piper. He was very convinced by her. He did want desperately to believe in the afterlife. He had lost a young son, Herman. There's often that tremendous desire. I've lost a sister. I'd love to believe she still exists in the world. I know how powerful that desire is. But that's different from any kind of proof or evidence.

Virtually all religious believers think the mind cannot be reduced to the physical mechanics of the brain. Of course, many believe the mind is what communicates with God. Would you agree that the mind-brain question is one of the key issues in the "science and religion" debate?

PINKER: I think so. It's a very deep intuition that people are more than their bodies and their brains, that when someone dies, their consciousness doesn't go out of existence, that some part of us can be up and about in the world while our body stays in one place, that we can't just be a bunch of molecules in motion. It's one that naturally taps into religious beliefs. And the challenge to that deep-seated belief from neuroscience, evolutionary biology and cognitive science has put religion and science on the public stage. I think it's one of the reasons you have a renewed assault on religious beliefs from people like Dawkins and Daniel Dennett.

The neuroscientific worldview -- the idea that the mind is what the brain does -- has kicked away one of the intuitive supports of religion. So even if you accepted all of the previous scientific challenges to religion -- the earth revolving around the sun, animals evolving and so on -- the immaterial soul was always one last thing that you could keep as being in the province of religion. With the advance of neuroscience, that idea has been challenged.

Some prominent scholars of the mind have not adopted the strict materialist position. The atheist Sam Harris, who's a neuroscientist by training, says he's not at all sure that consciousness can be reduced to brain function. He told me he's had various uncanny -- what some would call telepathic -- experiences. And there's David Chalmers, the philosopher, who's also critical of the materialist view of the mind. He has argued that the physical laws of science will never explain consciousness.

GOLDSTEIN: It's interesting. Actually, my doctoral dissertation was on the irreducibility of the mind to the physical. We have not been able to derive what it's like to be a mind from the physical description of the brain. So if you were to look at my brain right now, I would have to tell you what it is that I'm experiencing. You can't simply get it out of the physical description. So where does that leave us? It might mean that we're not our brain. It might mean that we have an incomplete description of the brain. Our science is not sufficient to explain how this extraordinary thing happens -- that a lump of matter becomes an entire world. But the irreducibility doesn't in itself show immaterialism. And you can turn it around and say, look, all the neurophysiology that we have so far shows there is a correlation between certain physical states and mental states. And even a dualist like Descartes said there's a one-to-one correlation between the physical and the mental. So I'm not sure that we've settled this question once and for all.

PINKER: I'm also sympathetic to Chalmers' view. It might not be the actual stuff of the brain that makes us conscious so much as it is the information processing. I don't think Chalmers' view would give much support to a traditional religious view about the existence of a soul. He says that consciousness resides in information. So a computer could be conscious and a thermostat could have a teensy bit of consciousness as well. Still, the information content requires some kind of physical medium to support the distinctions that make up the information. And the Cartesian idea that there are two kinds of stuff in the universe -- mind and matter -- doesn't find a comfortable home in current views of consciousness, even those of Chalmers.

I know neither of you believes in paranormal experiences like telepathy or clairvoyant dreams or contact with the dead. But hypothetically, suppose even one of these experiences were proven beyond a doubt to be real. Would the materialist position on the mind-brain question collapse in a single stroke?

PINKER: Yeah.

GOLDSTEIN: Yeah, if there was no other explanation. We'd need to have such clear evidence. I have to tell you, I've had some uncanny experiences. Once, in fact, I had a very strange experience where I seemed to be getting information from a dead person. I racked my brain trying to figure out how this could be happening. I did come up with an explanation for how I could reason this away. But it was a very powerful experience. If it could truly be demonstrated that there was more to a human being than the physical body, this would have tremendous implications.

Many stories of the paranormal turn on anecdotal, once-in-a-lifetime experiences. They fall outside the realm of what scientists can study because they are not repeatable. That raises the question, does science have certain limits to its explanatory power? Might there be other parts of reality that are beyond what science can tell us?

PINKER: It's theoretically possible. But if these are once-in-a-lifetime events, one has the simpler explanation that they're coincidences. Or fraud.

GOLDSTEIN: Or wishful thinking.

PINKER: Statisticians tell us that people underestimate the sheer number of coincidences that are bound to happen in a world governed by chance. That's why it would be essential to do the statistician-proof experiment or the Amazing Randi-proof experiment, showing that it isn't just stage magic. If that could be done, if you could show that someone could know something without it having to go through their sense organs -- that you could cut the optic nerve connecting the eyes to the brain and the person could still see. Then, yeah, everything that I've been saying would be refuted. The fact that we don't have reliable paranormal phenomena, the fact that all aspects of our experience do depend on details of the physiology of the brain, make it a persuasive case that our consciousness depends on the brain.

GOLDSTEIN: Yeah, but what you're saying could be very true. It could be in the nature of the phenomena that it's extremely difficult to reproduce it in controlled experiments. In which case, we'll never know. I think it's a kind of arrogance to say that our science is complete. It's an amazing thing that we can know as much about the physical world as we do know. Why assume that we know everything about the world that there is to know? We've developed through all sorts of happenstance a kind of methodology that allows us to know a tremendous amount. It's an extraordinary thing that we can test and probe nature. And it's yielded amazing secrets. But why assume that this methodology that we're just damn lucky to have been able to stumble upon is going to yield all secrets? Of course, there could be things beyond the reach of science. But could we have any good evidence for accepting it? As soon as you have good evidence, it becomes science. So can there be good evidence for non-scientific propositions? No. Because the minute there is good evidence, it becomes science.

I still have to wonder if the study of neurons, synapses and brain chemistry will ever be able to explain things like dreams or the creative process.

PINKER: That's a good example of something that's very difficult to study scientifically because it's rare and unpredictable. But it doesn't involve any kind of magic. When you throw together 100 billion neurons with 100 trillion connections, a lot of things are going to happen that are very hard to track down. And I suspect that creativity -- we don't call it creative unless it's rare -- means that it's going to be hard to study but not impossible. Historians who study creative individuals have uncovered a lot about the preconditions for creativity -- for instance, what goes into a Mozart or an Einstein.

They can understand that. But just by looking at the brain itself, will you ever be able to understand the creative mind?

PINKER: I suspect not. In fact, the reason I'm not a neurobiologist but a cognitive psychologist is that I think looking at brain tissue is often the wrong level of analysis. You have to look at a higher level of organization. For the same reason that a movie critic doesn't focus a magnifying glass on the little microscopic pits in a DVD, even though a movie is nothing but a pattern of pits in a DVD. I think there's a lot of insight that you'll gain about the human mind by looking at the whole human behaving, thinking and reporting on his own consciousness. And that might be true of creativity as well. It may be that the historian, the cognitive psychologist and the biographer working together will give us more insight than someone looking at neurons and brain chemistry.


-- By Steve Paulson

Fatwa Against Hamas for Having 'Jewish Characteristics'

Fatwa Against Hamas for Having 'Jewish Characteristics'
8 Sivan 5767, 25 May 07 08:30by Nissan Ratzlav-Katz(IsraelNN.com)

A Muslim cleric, apparently from the Palestinian Authority, has released a fatwa (religious ruling) permitting the killing of members of the Hamas terrorist organization. In support of his position, the heretofore unknown sheikh declared Hamas to have "Jewish characteristics;" yet, he said that "the Jews have more mercy" on the Arabs than Hamas.

The fatwa and accompanying argumentation appeared in two articles, one in the Saudi newspaper Al-Watan and the other published on the website of the Fatah terrorist organization, headed by Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas.

According to a report and translation of the articles provided by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), the Islamic cleric, identified as Sheikh Shaker Al-Hiran, labeled Hamas "Khawarij." This term is a reference to a group of Muslims that rebelled against the leadership of seventh-century Islam.

Among other affronts, the Fatah-backed sheikh declared, Hamas is willing to ally itself with non-Muslims and to battle co-religionists. Al-Hiran then said that Hamas-backed scholars should be confronted about the activities of their organization. "If they say that what they [i.e., Hamas members] do is prohibited, then you should kill them cold-bloodedly, [and you will] be rewarded by Allah for ridding Muslims of their influence and evil. Jews have more mercy towards our nation than [Hamas]. If they [i.e., the scholars] say that their conduct is permitted, then kill their scholars.... They are all the same."

In his article entitled "The Common Characteristics of Hamas and the Jews," Al-Hiran wrote that the Islamist group has "Jewish characteristics." For the PA sheikh, this means hypocrisy and a lack of trustworthiness, including breaking agreements reached with the Fatah leadership of the PA.

MEMRI analysts noted, "The articles triggered condemnation, such as a statement by Palestinian Authority Mufti Sheikh Muhammad Hussein, who labeled Al-Hiran's articles as a clear call for fitna (civil strife)." In particular, MEMRI reported that the article comparing Hamas to the Jews "triggered harsh reactions and prompted online messages from readers questioning Al-Hiran's existence." www.IsraelNationalNews.com© Copyright

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