The Binary Circumstance

This is what happens when faith comes in conflict with the physical laws of the universe.

Marshall Brain, the founder of How Stuff Works, has published a book online Why Does God Hate Amputees? that discusses the delusion of religious beliefs.

It sounds a lot like the book I wrote and many of the articles that I’ve written on my blog.

Links from MetaFilter.

The New York Times [reg. req.] has this great article about how art reaches Alzheimer’s patients in ways that other forms of communcation can’t.

What exists mostly is a stockpile of anecdotal evidence, encouraging but murky. Why did Willem de Kooning become more productive, almost maniacally so, as he descended into Alzheimer’s? Why does frontotemporal dementia, a relatively rare form of non-Alzheimer’s brain disease, cause some people who had no previous interest or aptitude for art to develop remarkable artistic talent and drive?

“Certainly it’s not just a visual experience – it’s an emotional one,” said Oliver Sacks, the neurologist and writer. “In an informal way I have often seen quite demented patients recognize and respond vividly to paintings and delight in painting at a time when they are scarcely responsive to words and disoriented and out of it. I think that recognition of visual art can be very deep.”

There has been so much going on in the news this past week: the Harriet Miers withdrawal, the indictment of Scooter Libby, the Iraq Charter was approved as the American death toll in the war hit 2,000, terrorist attacks in India, and hurricanes Wilma and Beta.

I’m left feeling a little overwhelmed by it all and not wanting to spend a lot of time writing about it. I’m thinking that the best thing I can do for myself as the Bush White House implodes and the world is racked with violence and natural disasters, is go outside every time it stops raining and enjoy the sun when it comes out.

With all this tragedy and disaster going on I find it a little too coincidental that The New York Times [reg. req.] is publishing a series about the importance of myth in elevating the human condition. The first article is by Karen Armstrong.

Mythology is not an early attempt at historical writing and its stories were never regarded as merely factual. In the pre-modern world, there were two recognised ways of arriving at truth, which the Greeks called mythos and logos. Both were considered essential and neither as inferior to the other. They were complementary modes of acquiring knowledge, each with its own distinct sphere of competence.

People used logos (“science; reason”) to function efficiently in the external world: this type of thinking was essential to the organisation of society or for the development of technology. Logos is pragmatic; it must correspond to objective facts. But it could not answer questions about the value of life nor mitigate the pain and sorrow that is an inescapable part of the human condition. That was the job of mythos. If a beloved friend died or if people witnessed an appalling natural disaster, they found that they did not simply want a rational explanation.

[...]

A myth was not true because it was factual but because it was psychologically effective. If it forced people to change their minds and hearts, gave them hope, and compelled them to live more fully, it was valid, because it told us something important about how humanity worked.

A myth was a programme for action. The myth of the hero, which is remarkably similar in nearly all cultures, showed people what they must do to tap into their own heroic potential. …

The Times article is apparently part of a huge world-wide propaganda campaign to encourage people to accept myth as the way to understand the real truth about the human condition, which is (surprise!) beyond the scope of reason and rationality, at least according to Armstrong.

The Myths is a series published by Canongate Books, with 33 publishing houses, “in the most ambitious simultaneous worldwide publication undertaken”. In each book, a world class writer retells a myth. The first three — Karen Armstrong’s A Short History of Myth, Jeanette Winterson’s Weight and Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad — are published next week. [emphasis their's]

The article is so nonsensical that I’m not going to say anything more about it. It’s bad enough to have to listen to all the bad news being fed to us by the media, I don’t want to have to then be lectured by the media on the importance of making up fantasy stories to help me deal psychologically with the version of reality they are presenting. (According to Media Matters, making up fantasy stories is something the mainstream media is very good at, even when it comes to reporting “news.”)

Doesn’t dealing with reality require that you know the facts of reality? Rather than giving us the facts, it seems they are going to give us a lesson in the importance of myth making.

Rather than listening to the media distort and attempt to interpret reality for me, I will most likely go outside and play in it.