Popularity of Christianity

In the last century, John Lennon of the Beatles got a lot of hate when he said that they (The Beatles) were more popular than Jesus Christ.  It may have been true, based on the statistics, but Christians are annoyed by this kind of statement regardless of any truth there may be in it.

In the last few days, a CBS News website has been reporting an opinion that in a decade or so, Christianity may not be the majority religion in the USA.  (I don't know whether that prediction counts the Roman Catholics among the Christians--which in my opinion they should--but this time, I expect a little less hate than with John Lennon.)  Christian leaders, some of whom have been drawn to Christian Leadership because of the fame and the financial rewards, have caused the faithful to be disillusioned with their message.  Hordes of former Christians have left organized religion, and sometimes begun to call themselves atheists, or simply said that they belong to no specific religion or denomination.

Even being an atheist, I believe there is still a philosophical role for Christianity to play.  For years, Christian leaders--for their own inscrutable reasons--downplayed the messages in the Sermon on the Mount, and in most of the parables, to focus on a certain defensive attitude towards the religion.  It is more important to defend the religion, they say, than to turn the other cheek.  It is more important, according to some of these leaders, to keep the Leadership in private jets, than to give to the poor.  It is more important, according to some of these leaders, to elect political leaders who support the church, than to elect those whose agendas include helping the poor and the indigent.  I think it is time now, for new church leaders to come forward, who teach the gospel, and the true spirit of the gospel.

Because of the cynicism of our age, there will be few who heed the urging to charity, to the other-centeredness that Jesus taught.  Many will say: Jesus helps those who help themselves.  Many will say: Charity begins at home; we must first help the Christian Leaders, and the money will trickle down to the poor and needy.  But those who are inclined to adopt Christian morality, the Sermon on the Mount, who feel a sense of responsibility to oppose the economics which ensures that some families earn enormous wealth, while other families can hardly exist (after all, the political philosophy of the USA seems to support the view that the extraction of anything the traffic will allow is fine) those of us who abhor this economics that supports those who already have more than they need, we have no philosophical home.  Where can a family turn, so that its children are surrounded with those who feel that they have an obligation to look after their fellow-man, and not just their fellow-family-members?

It is not the habit of atheists to get together on Sundays (or any days, for that matter), to take a holiday from the usual cynicism they find at work.  We don't have feasts, we don't have gatherings--at least I don't think we do; we don't get together enough for me to find out.  We don't have big weddings (but my wife and I did; it was sort of a party!) we don't have big funerals (though when my close friend died a couple of years ago, his former colleagues got together, to reminisce about all his great characteristics.  And there was a lot of food!), atheism is not a social thing.  It could be, I suppose.

Perhaps these mega-churches should fade away.  Some of them are probably doing some good, but a lot of them seem focused on spewing hate against The Left, which is trying to rein in the greed of big businesses, on spewing hate against other religions.  Occasionally, I suspect, spewing hate against the Catholics, and the Pope.  And now: spewing hate against same-sex couples, and anyone in the LGBTQ++ spectrum, and proponents of unisex toilet facilities.  Are there churches that spew hate against electric cars?  I would like to know, so that I can shower ridicule upon them.  I promise to be very gentle.

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Kim's Game

When I was young, I signed up for Boy Scouts.  At that time--and possibly even now; I'm out of touch with them--a lot of the early skills taught in Boy Scouts meetings were based on the Kipling book Kim, as well as The Jungle Book.  

One of the most central activities, presented as a game, was Kim's Game.  It just struck me that many of the skills I have been trying to teach, as I taught mathematics, presupposed the skills taught in Kim's Game.

Boy Scouts are probably grinning to themselves, but I need to describe this activity to get everyone on the same page.  (A very close relative of this game is Concentration, so if you feel a sense of deja vu, that's where it's coming from.)

Before the tribes gather, the leader (or, as we called him, the Scoutmaster) lays 30 or 40 assorted objects on a table, and covers them up with a cloth.  Once everyone is present, and preliminary activities have been concluded, each participant is given a sheet of paper, and something to write with   The leader then pulls off the covering cloth, for a specific amount of time.  (The more practiced the participants are, the briefer the time interval could be.)

Once the table is covered again, the participants (frenziedly) write down as many of the articles on the table as each one can remember.

At this point, the game can proceed in different ways; each person's list can be verified, to eliminate imaginary articles, and winners announced according to who has the longest list.  Other times, it could be more about which item was most overlooked!  When the troop is divided up into subgroups, such as colors, or clans, the lists of the members of each subgroup could be consolidated (put together), which would make it a rivalry between these subgroups.  (This makes verification less tedious, at any rate.). The whole point is to improve the participants' observation.

I remember we had Kim's Game regularly.  As one who taught   Integration, a technique used in calculus, we were using a technique that depended on the student noticing that the integral contained a certain configuration.  It was more difficult for me to teach the class to  notice that the configuration was present, than to teach them what to do with it (once the configuration had been spotted).  So teaching calculus regressed into essentially teaching observation.

Olivia Newton-John

A beautiful face is a wonderful thing for anyone to have.  An amazing voice would be great, as well.  What about a glowing smile?

ONJ had all three!  I would say---at the risk of making a lot of women mad---that Olivia Newton-John had one of the most dazzling smiles I have ever seen.  Many women, including my lovely wife, have wonderful smiles.  Olivia's smile was more: it was blinding.  You would imagine she was deliriously happy, and was about to break into laughter!  And maybe she was!

She died of cancer, and she probably was diagnosed many years ago.  She was a simple person; perhaps that was---and I'm going to be killed for saying this---clear in her expression.  She could look on the bright side of life easily.

I will miss her.

Men and Women Are Equal?

When I was growing up, the equality of women was not something that was taken for granted, either by men or by women.

Make no mistake; there were plenty of enlightened men who believed in something close to this principle of equality.  Our cultural history—like most countries—was dominated by men, who were ruthless about protecting their advantages.  But over the years and centuries, the rights accorded to women were accumulated, and on one fine day in the early sixties, a Sri Lankan woman became the first elected female head of state.  (Even then, she was elected from within a political party, therefore she was not elected by the popular vote.)  Furthermore, traditionally in many Asian countries, women were the heads of households.

In the family in which I grew up, our mother was the head of the household, for many practical reasons: she earned the larger paycheck; she managed the home; she had the larger influence over the education of the children; and she had a degree of influence over my father’s occupation indirectly: he was a pastor, and he volunteered her for various responsibilities in the ‘parish’, such as the so-called women's fellowship, the Sunday-School, the flowers for church, the choir, and so on.  So my mother held not one job, but about 5.

The equality of women and men as far as talent was concerned was never in any doubt, in our family circle, and as I was growing up, in our country at large.  So it was with efficiency and capability.  Women did continue to be suppressed, ultimately, for political reasons.  Men believed that women did not have the judgement that some office required.  Some men were prejudiced against women.  Some men resented women for reasons that never emerged.  This is true of almost every society: men simply could not bring themselves to declare that women were equal to men politically; the most they could concede was that women deserved the vote.

What do I personally think?

The question of equality between the sexes is vague.  As long as women have the unique responsibility for bearing children, this fact establishes an asymmetry in the comparison of the two sexes.  All rights and privileges of government and society should be equal to the two sexes.  But the phrase ‘The sexes are equal’ simply does not make sense.

Of course, I speak as a mathematician.  It does not make sense to say that a Ford is equal to a Toyota.  In what sense? is the question that springs to the lips.  Are men and women equal in the athletic field?  In the boxing ring?  In the Olympic games?  In family planning?  In insurance premiums?  In bathrooms?  I believe that equality is not true in all these areas.  As long as women and men are more comfortable with many activities taking place in segregation, there cannot be unqualified ‘equality’.  (I’m using the word unqualified in the sense of unrestricted.)

I wish this was a forum where you readers can respond to these posts.  You can, but hardly anyone does!  Well, I'm aware of this inequality between us, so the lack of any counterarguments to my opinion will not make me assume that I have won the debate.

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I'm a Foodie!

These days I spend a lot of time reading.  It so happens that I was reading a passage about a meal, and now I'm hungry for pasta!  It's only 8 in the morning, and I'm craving Fettuccine Alfredo.  (Actually, from a nutritional point of view, it's better to eat something heavy and cheesy earlier in the day, so that the food circulates all over your body as you walk around.  Instead, if you eat late and go to bed--or stay seated--the food just diffuses to the tissue near your belly, so you're likely to grow your belly.)

I once made Alfredo from scratch from a recipe in a Time/Life book, and it was the most heavenly thing we ever ate.  Butter, cream, black pepper, fresh grated Parmesan.  Italian cooking is (supposedly) all about the fresh ingredients.  In contrast, French cooking is about the sauces, though that's probably an oversimplification.

But there's no doubt that I am hopelessly suggestible; if I read about pizza ...

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A Conundrum

First off: is the plural of 'paradox' simply 'paradoxes', or 'paradoci'?  (Or is a paradox better than one dox, and already plural?)

Ok, here's the conundrum, and it's a serious issue.  From a lot of what I've read, in order to avoid unnecessary weight gain, the nutrition gurus advise to only eat when you're hungry.

Now, obviously in modern communal or family living, when one person cooks for a whole group, for the sake of efficiency, the whole group ought to eat together, even if they're not all simultaneously hungry.  So what to do?

There are lots of possible solutions, depending on the micro-culture of the group: is it OK to leave the cooked food on the counter, for each person to eat when they're ready?  Who's going to wash up? And so on.

I had several other conundrums lined up, but now I've forgotten ...

Patience, and Rhetoric

I had vowed (in a manner of speaking) to be patient with the Alt-Right.  It is so easy to be annoyed with their lack of substance, their disregard for the health of the very old, the very young, and the very poor; their tolerance for the deceit of Trump and his running dogs, and their opposition to Biden's programme.  That last is a given; the GOP wants the Democrats out of office, and Mitch McConnell has long ago shown how utter disregard for the needs of the electorate is rarely punished by the voters.

Giving in to the annoyance that we (or I, anyway) feel is easier on me, because after a while, thinking of the conservatives as a herd of imbecile lemmings streaming over some cliff overlooking the sea is a comforting image.  But anyone who has been paying attention to reporting by the media on individuals, formerly Alt-Righters, coming in from the cold, reveals that a host of them have found it difficult to turn a blind eye to the untruthful rhetoric emanating from Trump Central.  Therefore it is imperative that these refugees from the GOP are met with reason, rather than knee-jerk viciousness.

I'm using "rhetoric" in a slightly illegal sense.  The word really means the tone of a speech, the choice of words of a speaker (or a writer) that is deliberately intended to create a certain effect in the audience.  The common usage of the word implies that rhetorical language is, to various degrees, deceitful.  It need not be, but when the term rhetoric is used increasingly in recent times, because of the rhetorical excesses of the speech on the right, the difference between rhetoric and lies becomes blurred.

But the word rhetoric is still useful, because it conveys that the people who use it today knowingly use it to create a certain impression, while knowing that it stretches the truth, or, increasingly today, consists of out-and-out lies.

For instance, when the Alt-Right leaders suggest that the COVID vaccines are unsafe, it is rhetoric, because the CDC was slow to actually certify them, and vaccines are guilty of being unsafe until proven innocent.  When they say that the vaccines are an aspect of government control, even mind control, they are engaging in slander, that is, lying.

However, some of these "second-rank" GOP leaders are so feeble-minded that they believe their own rhetoric, their own lies, that is, and lose sight of the actual facts that they have to deal with.  For instance, Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor who is a presidential hopeful, initially cooperated with Trump to minimize the danger of COVID.  Then he, with Trump, chose to cast doubt about the efficacy of the vaccine, just so that Biden would be ineffectual in controlling the spread of infection.  But it so happened that the infection was controlled partially, in such a way that the efficacy of the vaccines, at least temporarily, was established, and the shortfall of the vaccines from total effectivity could be easily seen to be caused by dangerous behavior by people carrying infections.  By easy implication, Ron DeSantis and his cronies could be considered to actually cause the spread of COVID in conservative states.  And now, it is mostly conservative states in which the infection is rampant.  And the very constituents of Ron DeS. and his conservative fellow-governors, are dying, which reveals the utter contempt these people have, the sorry lack of compassion they have, for the weaker ones within their flock--thinking for a moment of these governors as shepherds.  This is not just callous, it is stupid.  Well, they are all ambitious, all eager to join the line of conservatives seeking the White House.  The members of their states may overlook their callousness, and vote for them for president.  But the country as a whole is more likely to remember their ignorance, their callousness, and their stupidity.  In their eagerness to cast shade on Biden, they have thrown their old and feeble, their low-paid hospital workers, the teachers in their schools, under the bus.  It was so preventable.

So we know that the conservative candidates for the presidency in 2024 are going to be callous, and stupid, and ignorant.  Certainly, they are going to be weak in their science background.  They are going to have to be fast talkers.  And they're not going to persuade too many people.  Their chance may come in 2028, after the Democrats have dragged themselves kicking and screaming into moving the country towards a more equitable society, and a less violent climate.  If they don't, conservative rhetoric hardly matters.

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