Stan Taylor

This Astronomy Picture of the Day is accompanied by this text:

Here is one of the largest objects that anyone will ever see on the sky. Each of the fuzzy blobs in the above picture is a galaxy, together making up the Perseus Cluster, one of the closest clusters of galaxies. The cluster is seen through the foreground of faint stars in our own Milky Way Galaxy. It takes light roughly 300 million years to get here from this region of the Universe, so we see this cluster as it existed before the age of the dinosaurs.

Just a small reminder of humanity’s insignificance in the grand scheme of things.

I shot this photo of UT’s Frank Erwin Center (aka ‘the drum’) out the window of my car as I passed by on I-35 yesterday evening. Despite the moving vehicle and my keeping some attention on my driving, I somehow managed to keep the camera fairly still relative to the Erwin Center. The blur in front of it is a passing 18-wheeler in the southbound lanes of I-35. (The Erwin Center was lighted UT burnt orange, by the way)

Greg Knauss has one explanation for the politics of hatred that I wrote about yesterday:

There is a divide in this country today, miles wide and fathoms deep. It has cleaved our great nation, and has only grown — and will only continue to grow. But it’s not a left/right split, or Democrat/Republican one. It’s lunatic/non-lunatic.
Our culture has been swept along in a tide of emotionally-resonant, steadfastly anti-rational entertainment, and politics is at the head of the wave. The course of our country, the future of our people, is being determined by lizard-brain responses to images designed to trigger sub-rational responses.
Michael Moore and Ann Coulter aren’t opposed to each other, they are each other: determined propagandists, using the language and mediums best suited to strike at the emotional core of their audiences. They do not work from a common set of facts, and would ignore them even if they existed. When they speak well, they’re Henry V on St. Crispin’s Day. When they speak poorly, they’re a spittle-flecked wacko with an “End of the World is Nigh” sign. But that’s just a matter of presentation: they’re all lunatics, asking us to stop thinking and start feeling. And to start feeling what they want us to feel.
This determined emotionalism — which is another way of saying anti-rationalism — is what drives us today. You can find it distasteful, you can find it depressing, but it’s most important impact is that we have turned over the direction of the country — our future — to the part of our psyche that doesn’t want to think.
It’s not about smarts. The lunatics aren’t stupid — just the opposite. It’s about the willingness to abandon the deductive process in favor of epiphany. It’s about the abandonment of the brain in favor of the gut.
Jon Stewart has said all this, of course, and said it better. But it hit home, hard, because I recently discovered — realized — that I am not immune. I edged up against the lunatic side of the divide the past few weeks. I went — close, anyway — mad. I was angry, irrationally furious, to the point of raging at the world — appallingly, my children included — that things were going they way they were. I stared into the abyss, from the wrong side, and it scared me.
A potential reason for my brush has to do with how I spend my time: on the Internet. The Web is a festering cesspool of lunacy and emotion: Free Republic, Daily Kos, Little Green Footballs, Atrios, Instapundit, on and on and on. Facts only enter the picture when they’re favorable. Emotion rules. There is no common ground, nor a desire for any.
That’s a problem.
Left or right, Democrat or Republican, these labels don’t mean much in the face of the looming (or nearly complete) lunatic take-over. Dispassion and reason are qualities that need to be nurtured and promoted from every political viewpoint, even — or especially — in the face of spittle-flecked wackos.
The question is, where do we start?

I choose to remain on the side of carefully reasoned political opinions. If that marginalizes me in the current political wars, so be it. It saddens me greatly to know that the ‘mainstream’ has become so irrational, but I refuse to take part.

During the Clinton administration, many Americans united in their hatred of the president. In the process, they built a powerfully effective political machine. But the hatred always bugged me. The George W. Bush presidency has had a similar effect on a different group of Americans–among which I count myself. But again, I have instinctively shied away from the hateful ‘ABB – Anyone But Bush’ mentality.
In the last four years, the Democratic party has put together a political machine to rival that of the Republican machine (though not quite good enough based on Kerry’s narrow loss yesterday). Today, the expressions of hatred are especially strong from the left. In some cases, they are the very same words the other side repeated during the Clinton administration. “Not My President” reads the bumper sticker.
I have been thinking over this post for several days, but not found a way to express exactly what bothers me about the politics of hatred. Do we really want our political process reduced to this?

What Would a Dumbass Republican Do?
“WWADRD?
Dear Friends:
If the shoe was on the other foot, What Would a Dumbass Republican Do?
Get depressed?
Get down?
Feel defeated?
Go away?
Refrain from being an obnoxious pain in the ass, 24/7?
Temper his sense of righteous entitlement?
Mute his howls of indignation?
Question his convictions?
Hell, no!
Here’s what a Dumbass Republican would do:
Act like a winner in a world full of deluded losers.
Refuse to let the “facts on the ground” deter his belief in what he’s got coming.
Drown out polite civil discourse by braying his unshaken beliefs like a stuck pig.
Refuse to shut the fuck up.
Refuse to go away.
Wrap himself in the flag and impugn the patriotism of any who would question his moral superiority.
Wear a big shit-eating grin that gives the other side just a moment of pause as they lay their heads on their pillows at night.
Have a glint in his eye that says, “I may have a shit-eating grin on my face, but I’m just waiting for an opportunity to slip this knife in.”
See this not as a defeat, but as an inconvenient mistake.
Friends, join me.
Do not accept.
Do not waver.
Do not shut up.
Do not give comfort with your distress.
Be an unrelenting irritant.
Be a dumbass.
Right now, attitude is everything.
Together, we can help each other bear the present while shortening the time – and it will come – when we prevail.”

I haven’t been reading much lately. My interest in reading comes in waves, and I have certainly been between waves for a while. After last summer’s disappointing reading, I decided to give up on ‘junk’ novels and read something a little more substantial. I started John Irving’s A Widow for One Year a while back. I am throroughly enjoying it, but it’s not engaged me to the point where I had to just finish it immediately.
Well, a few days ago, I decided to take a break from Irving. I have enjoyed some of the other novels by Lincoln Child and Douglas J. Preston (Relic, The Cabinet of Curiosities), so I picked up Childs’ Utopia. It was about as I expected: much of the technology was a logical, if stretched, extension of current knowledge, the characters were not terribly deep, and the some of the plot elements were not very subtle. But, it was entertaining enough that I completed it in a couple of days.

I’ve been a liberal Christian for many years now, and I have several very close gay Christian friends, so it should be obvious where I stand on the issue of the status of gays and lesbians in the church. I’ve thought about, prayed about and studied this problem off and on for a long time. But lately, I’ve been thinking about how to communicate my beliefs and thought processes to others succintly. I have boiled it down as follows:
Question: Does the Bible condemn ‘homosexuality’?
Answer: No. ‘Homosexuality’ as we currently define it it a modern, and very broad, concept, that includes many aspects: emotional intimacy, sexual acts, etc.
Question: Does the Bible condemn emotional intimacy between people of the same sex?
Answer: Absolutely not. It is my belief that if you put aside sex acts, there is no difference between close emotional friendships of many different types: siblings, close friendships, spouses, etc. For instance, my mother, my mother-in-law, and my aunt have lived together for several years. Their emotional relationship shows many of the same characteristics as a married couple.
Question: Does the Bible condemn same-sex sex acts?
Answer: For lesbians, no; nobody seems to claim that the Bible says anything about lesbian sex acts. As for male/male sex acts, my answer is possibly.
NOTE: This question is the one most people focus on: After reading a lot of exegesis of the passages in question, essays on the authority of the passages, etc., I’m willing to say that it’s possible the Old and New Testaments condemn male-male sex acts.
Question: Does any of the above matter in any case?
Answer: Not one bit, for two reasons.
First, the people who want to exclude gays from church base their opinion on the fact that they believe gays are unrepentant sinners (by their logic, gays continue to willingly participate in acts these people consider sinful; see the previous question). But if we go down that path, then we have to take a hard look at other types of unrepentant sinners whom we welcome in church. Jesus condemned divorce pretty unequivocally and harshly, yet we allow divorced persons into our communities of faith. Hell, I consider myself a pretty unrepentant sinner in regard Jesus’ directives to care for the poor and needy. I have good intentions, but when it comes right down to it, I’m pretty reluctant to give up any of my relatively cushy lifestyle for the well-being of others.
More importantly, though, I believe Jesus came to tell us to quit looking at the trees, and see the forest instead, worry about the spirit of the law, not the letter:

He said to him, ‘ You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbour as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.’ (Matthew 22:37-39)

As long as you struggle to live your life faithfully as you understand it, and in communion with others, that’s the big picture.

In each image below, the figure on the left is the original 1997 action figure; the figure on the right is the later re-release. I’m sure that this comparison demonstrates some profound and tragic change in our society, but frankly, I’m not sure exactly what it is. (see originals).
 

A friend and former co-worker of mine, who is not a church-goer, sent me an email today, saying she had reluctantly attended church (an evangelical mega-church) this past Sunday to witness the baptism of a coworker’s children. Her opinion of the service: “And actually, if it hadn’t been for all the god stuff, I would have enjoyed it.”

Malcolm Gladwell, one of my favorite essayists, has a new article in the New Yorker in which he examines the conventional wisdom about prescription drug prices in the U.S.
Gladwell does not deny that the drug companies are money-hungry machines that are willing to do pretty much anything to increase their profits. But Gladwell points out that the situation is much more complex than that. It’s an excellent read.
I’m a sucker for any writer who points out that the reality of a situation is more complex than most others portray it.

They grow ’em big in New Zealand!