Religion, Faith and Belief – well covered in the Media, but with different slants

By Gary Berg-Cross

Lots of media (newspapers, magazines, radio and online types like blog sites etc.) have a Religion section or its equivalent.  WaPo has it online under the National section where you can read about the “Latest Religion News.

This includes local Religion events from around the Washington area including music

(Dixieland jazz), Martha’s Table, food drives, Super Bowl Fellowship, Bible study, yoga, wellness, organ recitals.

Under the WAPO  RELIGION heading you read how the ubiquitous  (and Controversial)

Koch brothers give big (again) to Catholic University. But you can also find related  coverage under the Metro or Style section which has On Faith.

The NYT has a Religion and Belief section with occasional posting like:

Mark Oppenheimer Beliefs column. A January post observed that many faiths struggle with concept of animal ensoulment; cites proliferation of pet cemeteries throughout the United States.

An earlier one in January was about former NY Gov Mario Cuomo willingness to speak publicly about his religious beliefs.

On Xmas day atheist Mark Bittman Op-Ed article cross-posted there that reflects that 2014 was the 100th anniversary of Christmas truce during World War I, when soldiers from both sides took break from fighting to be festive together.

Also on Xmas dayT M Luhrmann had a cross posted Op-Ed article about people attending God-neutral, growing in popularity movements like Sunday Assembly around Xmas Yes even for atheists group ritual is important to make sense of the world.

Even the Guardian has a Religion section and moving to online phenomena the news aggregating blog site called  the Huffington Post has a Religion news section. It’s under its Voices category. As a liberal site I find its coverage includes a bit more critical tone than most of the others. You can read about “Why Julianne Moore Stopped Believing In God” They break faith down into several categories and also have a  Religion and Science section that features "blog posts and news reports that address the ongoing conversation and tension between religion and science. The page has a pro-science and pro-faith point of view and highlights smart, sophisticated perspectives from all religious traditions on how to best improve relationships between these two fields of inquiry."

These feature research and fact-oriented coverage and not just opinion. Recent examples include, “Children Exposed To Religion Have Difficulty Distinguishing Fact From Fiction, Study Finds”  and “Religious Objections To Vaccines Are A Threat To Public Health.”

Still I find most of these sites could be considered religiously or faith oriented. They are labeled so.

A bit different is the Belief section of the very liberal blog aggregator Alternet.  Here we are beyond a religious and religious faith slant to one of the more general topic of belief including secular belief. Atheism is pretty prominently featured and discussed and discomfort to faith-based belief folks is likely.  They cover issues in a more confrontational way - sort of like a New Atheist style, but they include articles that might take on that topic too.

Recent posting included:

Eminent Biologist: Religion Should Be Eliminated for the 'Sake of Human Progress'

E. O. Wilson: You don't have to be an atheist to know that religion is harming the Earth.

Of course some of the coverage discusses the religio-political connections such as:

People With No Religion Underrepresented By a Factor of 100 in Congress ...

AlterNet-Jan 28, 2015

20 percent of Americans have no affiliation with organized religion. Only 0.2 percent of Congress says the same. By Zaid Jilani.

Another one with political connections was “This Week in Religion: Huckabee Claims God Blessed Him, and Mormons Back LGBT Rights.” 

Dan Arel, author of Parenting Without God and blogs at Danthropology, authors the This Week in Religion section. Just in January he has covered some critical topics:

This Week in Religion: Pope Francis Tells His Flock to Stop Breeding Like Rabbits Jan 23, 2015,

This Week in Religion: Christians Continue Their Assault on LGBT Community Jan 17, 2015,

The Past Week in Religion: God Pronounced Owner of an Alabama City Jan 11, 2015, and 

This Week in Religion: Bristol Palin Decries Separation of Church and State: Jan 2, 2015,

Other recent posts on Alternet.org include some overviewing non-belief in a bit of the way other media feature an established religion.

The 6 Types of Atheists and Non-Believers in America

AlterNet-Nov 17, 2014

The answers tell us a lot about religion and non-belief in America. ... Not all of them identify as atheist or agnostic or a non-believer, but plenty do, and while there are many people offering to defend this particular community, few are willing to speak for them. ...

Still other posts are critical of religious leaders such as:

Billy Graham's Son Is One of America's Most Dangerous Islamophobes. This one by Bill Berkowitz  was aggregated from another liberal blog site TruthOut.

Alternet is one of those challenging sites.  No one is going to agree with everything they feature, but you get some interesting topics, usually documents and well reasoned if a bit argumentative – sort of like the New Atheists. An example is the “12 Worst Ideas Religion Has Unleashed on the World” By Valerie Tarico who argues that these 12 dubious concepts advocate conflict, cruelty and suffering. Among them are things hard to disagree with:

The idea of  Heretics, kafir, or infidels (to use the medieval Catholic term) are not just outsiders, they are morally suspect and often seen as less than fully human. In the Torah, slaves taken from among outsiders don’t merit the same protections as Hebrew slaves.”  Or Holy War – If war can be holy, anything goes.”  Blasphemy the notion that some ideas are inviolable, off limits to criticism, satire, debate, or even question. is of course on the list, but the #1 listed was:

Chosen People –The term “Chosen People” typically refers to the Hebrew Bible and the ugly idea that God has given certain tribes a Promised Land (even though it is already occupied by other people). But in reality many sects endorse some version of this concept. The New Testament identifies Christians as the chosen ones. Calvinists talk about “God’s elect,” believing that they themselves are the special few who were chosen before the beginning of time. Jehovah’s witnesses believe that 144,000 souls will get a special place in the afterlife. In many cultures certain privileged and powerful bloodlines were thought to be descended directly from gods (in contrast to everyone else).

Religious sects are inherently tribal and divisive because they compete by making mutually exclusive truth claims and by promising blessings or afterlife rewards that no competing sect can offer. “Gang symbols” like special haircuts, attire, hand signals and jargon differentiate insiders from outsiders and subtly (or not so subtly) convey to both that insiders are inherently superior.

No feel good Super Bowl Fellowship coverage likely at Alternet.org, but lots of thought poking topics.  It not only makes you think, it makes you want to think. 

Let Us Now Celebrate Emotion-Packed Civil Religions

by Gary Berg-Cross

It's another "who will win" weekend in America.  As we approach basketball conference championships, March madness and the Super Bowl fades into the distance, we can gather round our hearths and TVs to

watch the big Oscar shootout. It's a well used cliché to compare our love of sport to religion but it applies at times to other big, competitive award-events contest like the Oscars and of course political contests (stay tuned).  

People have noted some reasons for the Sport-Religion connection. Writing in the Christian Century 30 years ago, Joseph L. Price said, 

"[T]here is a remarkable sense in which the Super Bowl functions as a major religious festival for American culture, for the event signals a convergence of sports, politics, and myth. Like festivals in ancient societies, which made no distinctions regarding the religious, political and sporting character of certain events, the Super Bowl succeeds in reuniting these now disparate dimensions of social life."

Part of this fusion is opportunistic timing.  Important games are played on the weekend when there is time away from work...Especially the Lord's Day for the Superbowl (and I guess Oscar to cross into celebrity). It may be part of this replacement of communal ritual that people seek. Part of it bubbles up in the language of metaphor.  There are "Hail Mary passes". We all understand some of this ritualistic language.  We come together over it.

Some type of transcendent work day devotion is evident both sports and religion and there is a flavor of heartland nationalism to both. Things shut down and the cultural hive-mind gets focused on the Event and its culture. For football it can be the comfort of buffalo wings and grilled alternatives, neighbored by some dips and potables. It's probably not a festal offering, but people may have their own way of helping their "team" win. Different ethnic groups wear food as an outward sign as readily as a Yamaka. And here is atways hyphenated American comfort food like pizza.  And what could make the Oscars more American Gothic than serving pizza during the event and at the event!

Speaking of winning, sure events like Olympics has this nationalist "civil religious" feeling 
of affirmation and energy elevation too. It's a bit like a patriot war with cultural rituals to bind us to the team.  Randall Collins gets at some of the underlying emotional factors that bind people to both sport and religion in Interaction Ritual Chains. A starting premise is that human beings are Emotional Energy seekers. That goes back to our social evolution. Having evolved in small groups we are hungry for emotional group and personal experience.  In this light human activity involving social life and energy tends to be part of what Collins calls an interactive ritual chain. Collins description of ritual chains is pretty simple. They involve:

1. feelings of belonging (yeah team), 
2. a sense of co-presence (we are with you), 
3. a moral feeling (atheists are evil and on the wrong side of issues), 
4. membership symbols (got my redskins hat), and
5.  barriers to outsiders (no Muslims need cheer for my team). 

The next time you watch a Redskins game think about these chained feelings. But think also more broadly that history and symbols of the United States have resulted in a sort of pseudo-state religion - a civic religion that includes sports and cultural heroes/celebrities in some type of ritual celebrating space along with our historical figures.

And there is other factors that strengthen the ritual chain bonds in a civic/civil religion and its celebrated events. All such games are spectacles like a 4th of July fireworks celebration and have themes that we see in mythical heroic stories. They go back to favorite players and plays of prior games. Sure we have Washington and Jefferson as historical players. In the sports celebration think Super Bowl highlights or a Duke player scoring the winning basket in the last 3 seconds. BTW, the theme for this year's Oscars?  Heroes...

These group stories include the ideas of sacrifice and toil with potentially glorious payoffs of conquest and victory. Well Bush's wars in the Middle East didn't have those payoffs, but there was certainly an effort to tell the story in heroic terms of sacrifice as part of a civil religion fusion. Our troops were just like our revolutionary war patriots...Only in the Middle East. Yeah for democracy, whether you asked for our version or not.

These fusions of victory are often celebrated in cinema as well as half-time shows. And of course certain participants like quarterbacks take on heroic, demi-god properties.  That was true of Denver's Peyton Manning.  The focus on definable heros can distort are reasoning in a team sport, but this idea of uncertainty and testing of one's betting hunches is part of the attraction to the event. We like the betting aspect of it.  It's almost a moral conviction. And team sport events are pretty

hard to predict accurately as are wars.  Luck and chance has so much to do with games and these are hard to factor in. As an example some of the folks who predicted the results of the national election in 2012 were predicting a toss up in the Super Bowl ("software projects Seattle winning 54.8 percent of the time with an average score of 23.8 to 21.5"). Election prediction champ Nate Silver picked the Seahawks as Super Bowl winners, but the margin was slight.

Perhaps the chance of a first play mistake may have tipped the odds unpredictably. This idea of a gamble is part of the attraction of these events and developing a winning bracketology becomes addictive behavior.  See my earlier blog on the psychological biases in the art of Bracketology.

So sure, it is fun to celebrate a cultural event pick out winners for the Oscar, as if this is based on some obvious merit that every voting body can agree on.  Except the  Academy is quite elite and different from the national population and has Hollywood factors at play ("I just don't like him.") Rating talent for March Madness (next in our Civic ritual chain Celebration?) is probably more grounded, but the bracketology of it remains quite a distance from a science. Luck and chance are there and thus there is an opportunity for people to feel that invisible deterministic connection with events.  We will be part of the game and make our team win through faithful devotion. We will participate in the addictive rituals of a civic-sports religion. The trickle down probably helps keep some Americans in the religious ritual circle. Pass the popcorn. 

Another Thing a Hebrew Bible Story Got Wrong

by Gary Berg-Cross

The story lines read "Archaeologists Carbon-Date Camel Bones, Discover Major Discrepancy In Bible Story." It's another one of those areas where scientific understanding runs up against mythic stories.  In this case Researchers Lidar Sapir-Hen and Erez Ben-Yosef (Tel Aviv University) report what seems like an historical mistake  laid out in the Bible tale.

The Hebrew Bible (aka Old Testament) mentions  camels as pack animals as early as the story of Abraham. Though there is no archaeological evidence of Abraham's life, we hear from some of the religious and scientific communities, including Chabad and the Associates For Biblical Research, cite the 20th century BCE as his time of birth. 

But carbon-dating has been used to determine the age of the oldest-known camel bones, and these support the view that camels were first introduced to Israel around the 9th century BCE. That's a few hundred years before the time the compilation Hebrew stories were written down, but perhaps a century after Abraham's life. Scholars tell us that "with the exception of a few biblical sections in the Prophets, virtually no biblical text is contemporaneous with the events it describes, and was subject to revision by later authors"....So we have reasonable evidence that writing or editing of the Hebrew text happened quite a bit after the events that are narrate stories.  (There have been large lists of Biblical criticism including sloppy editing.) Here we have a seeming case of human editing the "revealed" truth and making a rationalized, perhaps sensationalized certainly human contextualized story.  

Who to believe? There are some who revere the authors in absentia and still take the stories literally in part because the view of the world they tell of fallen heros, chosen groups, god-fearing behavior and non-interest in worldly things is compelling.

"Too bad", as someone once said of Freudian theory," it's a wonderful story, but it isn't true".

Losing and Finding: Morning Edition Series on Non-Believers

by Gary Berg-Cross

Morning Edition on NPR has been featuring a series called: Losing Our Religion. It's worth listen in.  Good for NPR...well the title might be framed a bit with loss, rather than finding something better than religion, but I'll give them good marks for balance within the shows.

Jan 14  they started with The Growth Of The 'Nones' the One-fifth of Americans  who say they're socially liberal and aren't looking for an organized religion. It's a topic written about on this blog, but NPR also provided info on their blog- .http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/01/14/169164840/losing-our-religion-the-growth-of-the-nones

Next they covered the topic of my more Young People Are Moving Away From Religion 
followed by how Nonbelievers Find Other Ways To Cope with tragedy. - "dealing with trauma and loss often requires forging one's own path."The shows give a clear voice to thoughtful non-belevers such as Mari Bailey who lost her son, Michael - killed by an acquaintance in Phoenix in 2004.  She lost not only her son but her faith as well as we read below discussing her feelings during loss.

I became more angry and I questioned, 'Why do I need to be praying at all? Why is my son dead? And what kind of God lets a child be shot?' "

- Mari Bailey

The most recent show is on"Making Marriage Work When Only One Spouse Believes In God." They speak with Mike Bixby & Maria Peyer at their home in Longview, Wash. Mike& maria ave been married for two and half years but have known each other since 1981. Peyer is a church-attending Lutheran, while Bixby is an atheist who expresses himself clearly and normatively:

"I do not believe that there is any sort of a higher power. I've made several attempts to go back and have faith, and it just doesn't work," he says. "It's not an open question for me anymore."

It's a bit of a rarity for mainstream news coverage but a welcome one and worth listening to.

Image

Mike and Maria: http://www.npr.org/2013/01/17/168954402/making-marriage-work-when-only-one-spouse-believes-in-god

WAPO discusses political leaders & religious beliefs

by Gary Berg-Cross

As part of their "Liberty, through the lens" series on the proper role for government in America today the Washington Post has moved to cover the topic of "Faith" (aka Religious Faith). 

They have started by asking a dozen Virginia  folks or so the Q -"Do you think a political leader should or should not rely on his or her religious beliefs in making policy decisions? How much does it matter to you that a candidate for president shares your religious beliefs?"

Johari Abdul-Malik (55) pictured above had one of the more liberal answers which sounded almost Unitarian although he was identified as Director of outreach, imam at the Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center (Falls Church)

"What I’m looking for in a candidate is a relationship with the golden rule. I’m not looking for whether you pray to the east or to the west as part of your religious underpinning, but do you have a relationship with the source of those values. "

We'll see how the series turns out. Virginia is an interesting state to discuss and the section starts with founding father Jefferson and his raised eyebrows about much of scripture. So far they haven't gotten around to asking Qs of people who have Jefferson's skepticism or are clearly Humanists, although they include Mormons who said "it’s not important to me for a politician to share my particular kind of faith." and Buddhists  who said "I think it's incumbent upon the political person to understand that there are different views of reality." In their second installment they has a Korean American pastor, Peter Chin, who became  interim pastor of the  Peace Fellowship in Northeast Washington. This seems like one of those "liberal churches" much discussed on this blog and Pastor Peter discusses being open-minded to help build relationships. In another life I might imagine him working for a humanist group.

As one can see from comments on the first article, a number of non-theists have jumped in to emphasize some of the Founder's ideas on the US as a country of laws - secular laws - guided by the Constitution.

All theisms are created equal

By Mathew Goldstein

I recently read the article Why I am not an Atheist by Pierre Whalon, Bishop of Convocation of Episcopal Churches in Europe, published in the Huffington Post on August 9. He starts by asserting that "by definition" there is no evidence for god, approvingly citing German Jesuit and theologian Karl Rahner for saying "God is not a datum in the universe." He also approvingly cites Thomas Aguinas for arguing that nothing can be proven from nature or scripture to those who do not have faith already.

Karl Rahner may have been right, but not because there is no evidence by definition according to the Christian bible, where God speaks and performs witnessed physical miracles onymously. Bishop Whalon, however, defines god as subsisting "completely outside of the universe". I will simply accept Bishop Whalon's definition of god since he is entitled to argue for his god on his own terms. I will then leave it to the reader to decide whether Bishop Whalon is being inconsistent here insofar as he also claims to be Christian according to the authority of the Christian bible.

I am not impressed with Bishop Whalon's citing some recent Scientific American articles for asserting that the existence of the multiverse "cannot be proven" and that the reason why math works "cannot be understood scientifically". "Cannot" is a strong word here, and my understanding is that supporting evidence for both is not outside the realm of the possible. In particular, we already have evidence for a multiverse in the sense that existing theories of how our universe functions which are favored by cosmologists appear to imply a multiverse. A multiverse is currently a highly speculative possibility and yet it is also better evidenced than any gods. This is important because we don't require "proof" to justify our theism/atheism beliefs, what is required is overall weight of the available evidence, and the evidence we have for a multiverse is unfavorable to gods being non-fictional.

Nevertheless, putting aside that his two examples may be be flawed, Bishop Whalon is no doubt correct on his main point, that "there are limits to the 'evidence' science can produce." He also says "the questions these limits raise are clearly not the confines writ large of human inquiry." But surely it is not merely inquiry that Bishop Whalon is advocating for when he advocates for Episcopalianism in particular, or even monotheism more generally. So its not clear what Bishop Whalon's point is here.

Since Bishop Whalon put the word evidence inside scare quotes, it is worth noting that evidence is not produced by science, at least not in an active sense. Evidence is that which was observed to happen. Scientists seek out, verify, and consume the evidence, they don't produce the evidence.

Bishop Whalon has conceded most of his argument from the start: There is no evidence for god. For some inexplicable reason, Bishop Whalon appears to think that theism is justified without providing any explanation for how it is justified. He mentions faith and intuition, but faith and intuition alone cannot justify belief. No belief about how the world works is justified without evidence.

Having first conceded that there is no evidence for god, he then concedes that the evils manifest in our universe are evidences against an all-knowing, all-powerful, all good, god. When we combine concession one with this second concession its even less clear why Bishop Whalon is a Christian theist. Bishop Whalon puts in a pitch for theism when he says "... a theist can be called to account because her religion has an ethical standard that stands completely over her. An atheist can have no such check." However, this isn't an argument that theisms are true. Its an assertion that only theistic religions provide ethical standards transcending the individual. Yet the individual is not transcended by any religions. Individuals have the option to believe or not in any particular religion. Furthermore, the ethical standards that religions provide may be unethical, or poorly defined, or undefined in any given context, thus taking us back to square one, or maybe worse.

Bishop Whalon, citing Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus as examples, points out that evil in the world is also a problem for atheists. Of course, evil is a problem for all people, but its not evidence against atheism. It is evidence against the set of theisms that posit a omnibenevolent deity.

Bishop Whalon then characterizes awe, intuition of a hidden order, curiosity, beauty of order, and the like as the domain of the "queen of of sciences" - theology. It is "that intuition -- that life has a meaning that transcends my momentary flicking in and out of it -- is for me confirmed by the revelation of God on the cross of Jesus...". Mesopotamians also had intuitions. The forces of Taimat and Abzu, who had emerged from a primordial chaos of water, created the 4 creator gods. The highest of the 4 gods was the sky-god An, the over-arching bowl of heaven. Next came Enlil who could either produce raging storms or act to help man. Nin-khursag was the earth goddess. The 4th god was Enki, the water god and patron of wisdom. These 4 gods did not act alone, but consulted with an assembly of 50, which is called the Annunaki. Innumerable spirits and demons shared the world with the Annunaki.

So, Bishop Whalon, why are your intuitions more accurate descriptions of how the world works than the Mesopotamians intuitions? You asserted "not all theologies are created equal", but I fail to see how we can logically adopt any particular religion when all religions are non-evidenced, counter-evidenced, intuitions. Intuitions about how the universe ultimately works are diverse, inconsistent, and, as human history amply demonstrates, inevitably false. Human intuition here is synonymous with human ignorance. You may think that relying on intuition to answer questions such as who created the universe, the ultimate purpose of people, the ultimate meaning of human lives, and the like is rational. I am convinced that the evidence demonstrates otherwise and you are mistaken. Those questions have simple, non-intuitive, negative answers. No intelligent agent intentionally created our universe, there is no ultimate purpose of people, there is no ultimate meaning to human lives.

Contrary to what Bishop Whalon argues, a story is not true because its implications "are trustworthy in the abstract" or because it is "personally relevant". Fictions can be trustworthy in the abstract and personally relevant. Bishop Whalon asserts that "what you believe ... makes up what you are ..." But we shouldn't be utilizing belief as a method of defining ourselves. Our beliefs reflect our best efforts at deciding what is true and false. Accordingly, we believe because the overall weight of the evidence directs us to what we must believe.

Bishop Whalon then confuses evidence justified belief with faith by concluding thusly: "Faith, atheist or otherwise, is never just a personal option. At least, not for long." On the contrary, faiths, no matter what their implications for the holders of those faiths and for others, are always a personal option. It is evidence alone that enables us to transcend personal options. In my judgment, the available evidence is that all gods are human created fictions, these fictions accurately reflect ignorant human intuitions, gods almost certainly do not exist, and in any case, by definition, we cannot be justified in believing in anything that resides completely outside of the universe.

Critical Thinking about the Future

by Gary Berg-Cross

Yogi Berra famously said “The future ain't what it used to be.” There are several ways to take this and recently I’ve been thinking about this from a futurist perspective. Obviously we have been having some hard times and seeking for some better things to look forward to. Some in the Techno-futurist camp are pretty bullish about things. There are light, business-tech futurists like New York Times columnist Tom Friedman who FLAT- out predicted global prosperity. A broader, professional effect comes out of the World Future Society (WFS) organization is in nearby Bethesda MD and I’ve read their THE FUTURIST magazine from time to time which features professional futurists, but also other interesting thinkers, scientists and passionate, informed lay-people who write and sometimes dialogue on interesting topics. Lisa Donchak, for example, has a blog on the WFS site (http://www.wfs.org/blogs/lisa-donchak ) with many interesting topics such as:

• Game Theory: How to Predict the Future of the American Budget
• What’s your Irrationality? and
  
• Wake Up, Traditional Economics!

Traditional Futurists have frameworks that assist in understanding topics like social, historical and technology trends. Serious Futurist workshops, such as the one coming up in July in address issues like:

• How will people in your part of the world live, work, and think in 2025?
• Which values, lifestyles, and structuring institutions will prevail?
• Will lifestyles be more complex or simpler?
• Which professions will be the most highly valued, and which personality types will best adapt?
• What culture-based hidden assumptions define the boxes in which you think and your notion of personal identity? (See http://www.wfs.org/content/trans-cultural-impacts-future0

Perhaps the best now-Futurist is Alvin Toffler who predicted main aspects of globalization 40 years ago. He popularized futurist views and terms in his portrait of things to come in his book called Future Shock. Toffler had mixed success with his crystal ball. He was good in predicting social trends and we continued to move into a more networked world that he foresaw. But not all predictions have been good. We have not achieved the substantial exploitation of the oceans or relative control of the weather that he proposed Two other major predictions of Toffler's – the paperless office and human cloning – have yet to be realized, although Toffler like some futurists can be fuzzy on exact time schedules and just point to a trend to more control of more of this. So while we continue a trend to expand into outer space, things have been slow and we have not generally profited financially from an initial move into space.

In the face of slow progress some fall back on interesting but challenging ideas of using space elevators as our means of getting into space. These replace rockets with structure designed to transport material from the surface of the Earth on or near the equator to geostationary orbit. Such discussions date back to 1895 when Konstantin Tsiolkovsky proposed a free-standing tower reaching from the surface of Earth to geostationary orbit which is 35,785 km from the surface (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator). Although this sounds like classic science fiction some “experts” say that research advances in nanotech could soon provide the materials necessary for this effort. Perhaps there will be a Grand Prize in this area. Already there are great sales pitches for the ride on a space elevator:

Our first stop will be the Bigelow Sky Hotel where some of you will begin your vacation among the stars. We will then continue on to the GEO area, 22,300 miles high where the rest of you will board a Virgin Shuttlecraft and continue to your destinations. For your convenience, the elevator is Internet-enabled allowing contact with loved ones on Earth. The trip takes seven days, so relax in your luxury suite and enjoy the beautiful views from space. From Dick Pelletier

Wild!  But as people note there’s lots of serious engineering that has addressed the issue. Still, like nuclear power, costs and safety seem serious issues. Can you imagine one of these structures failing and falling? What costly war targets they would represent. Much of our future may depend on our living in a much friendlier and safer world.

Futurology (aka futures studies) seems less a science of prediction than a branch art under the field of history about possibilities. Natural futurists Galileo and Leonardo could imagine helicopter flight and submarines. In fact, they did, following some highly inferencable trends. But they could not foresee advances like radar installation, nuclear reactors or carbon-dating, since these rely on physical systems they were unaware of.

Still, perhaps for fun, USA Today recently asked the Toffler team to project 40 more years into the future ("40 For The Next 40") -see http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2010-10-14-futureshock14_ST_N.htm

The Toffler group seems to follow somewhat of a linear trend model in 4-5 area that they say will “shape our world from now to 2050”. So in Politics they see an increase in female leaders and a push by religious groups to get into government and what they call "Philanthro-capitalists" such as Microsoft's Bill Gates will have more global influence. Technology they see as better linking of "answer seekers" with "problem solvers", having chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear & meteorological sensors integrated into our mobile devices. And it is easy to predict more invasions of our personal privacy— Data may be collected faster than it can be analyzed, resulting in what the Toffler group calls "cyberdust."

A different kind of la-la futurists has a strange combination of oddball scientists and skeptics. Some engage in UFO investigations. Such endless investigations appeal to a sort of grand skeptic type who raises the question of who really wrote Shakespeare’s plays. Some extreme futurists have a strange mix of rejection of consensus and an almost religious faith in some topics such as anti-gravitational technology. You can see some of their writing on some internet groups such as http://tech.dir.groups.yahoo.com/group/lvfuturists/

They claim special source of 'secret information' that is limited to a handful of people. They develop followers and can then make money selling books and getting paid for talks. They are weak on making testable predictions. To me this extreme form feels more like a religious faith if something that a scientific style belief mixed with skepticism and critical thinking. Techno-science is something to respect but when it becomes like a god then faith in the progress of science to solve everything takes on a religious tone.

One such area seems to exist around the idea of radical life extension. Technologists like Ray Kurzweil inventor, futurist, and author of The Singularity is Near is a well know voice on life extension. He is part of the baby boom generation that has an ever pressing, personal interest in the expansion of human life. Kurzweil believes that hyper expansion of technology is coming rapidly. By around 2029 he predicts that information technology will become more sophisticated than the human brain. This and other innovations that he trend-fully predicts will enable reversing of human aging, illness and death to be “cured.” These ideas, like space elevators, has lots of science appeal at first blush. The expanding technology innovation is summarized in his new book on the Singularity where info science, nanotechnology and biology hyper advance to allow us a singular freedom. The idea is that we will break free of previous biological constraints (see http://singularity.com/).

As I mentioned, one particular idea is about life expansion which is described at http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2006/02/kurzweil-radica-1.php. There is also a Barry Ptolemy documentary film called Transcendent Man which chronicles Ray Kurzweil life and ideas. Transcendent Man presents Kurzweil’s vision of what he calls a technological singularity. This is a point in the future (2040?) where ever accelerating technology will have advanced so rapidly that we humans will have to enhance ourselves with artificial intelligence in order to keep up with the change (and extreme Future Shock).

One appeal of the Kurzweil vision is that it not only avoids a decline, but predicts a Science-enabled dawning of a new civilization where world hunger and poverty will be solved. Future humans will no longer be dependent upon their physical bodies. Instead we will become billions or trillions of times more intelligent than what evolution has provided. As part of this we will essentially leave the real world and the ability to distinguish between real and virtual reality. 

Powerful ideas, and appealing in a down time for the USA. But I tend to doubt the vision, if only because it relies in part on a simple, linear projection. Like Galileo and Leonardo, it can see some things but not others. Some things like evolved intelligence are a highly dynamic.  The fulfillment of IT future visions rely on more than processing speed and large memory storage. The costly and limiting part of IT systems is now the design effort that goes into the programming and data structuring. It's like the building of a human body, which have chemical elements that cost a few bucks to purchase. The cost of structuring a cell from these elements is beyond a billion dollars, to say nothing of all the interacting systems assembled from many cells. There is no royal, linear road to this complexity. And there may be Black Swans along the way!

My worry is that there are groups of people who seem to be reacting a bit naively, if not slavishly, to the easy life expansion and immorality message. They assemble around a thought leader as in a church. Futurists like Kurzweil become high priests, if not a messiahs, to the Sci-Fi-ish faithful. Their writings become a bit like a sacred script projecting a vivid view of the future with little constraints. They create narratives, or at least lead to narratives, that break the bounds of critical thinking. 

Some disciples seem to become spin-meisters and profit oriented motivational speakers. They minister to a fearful flock who need an upbeat message in a time of crisis. Their talks and articles resemble Science Fiction more and more. They speak to a new-faith community, clinging to a message of tech-hope and avoiding critical thinking that may counter their new hopes.

I wish that Kurzweilian predictions were true. I am of the same generation so I here time's steps.  But I’m skeptical of a simple techno-fix as an easy way out of our problems (climate change included). It seems something like a royal road and I doubt that it will be so easy. We certainly need serious work along these lines and a spirit of hope, but hyping expectations can be a problem and developing religious-like atmospheres sets off alarm bells in my mind.