"Et je cours / Je me raccroche a la vie..."

[bronze_ribbons]

Too much writing and rehearsing to whale through tonight, so I'm at home instead of out. Hydras, hydras everywhere. On the plus side, I can now see my ironing board again, and I brewed a pitcher of tea using some of the mint I'd harvested and frozen last fall. Also:

The New York Times reports on how the palms for Palm Sunday are being harvested more responsibly. Which I found interesting (one of my chores when I worked at Christ Church was making sure they were stored properly), but I confess I was also amused by the final paragraphs of the article:

....exactly what they are used for up north [of Mexico] is not always clear.

"I know it’s used for decoration," said Moses Macal Maroukin, 69, a veteran palm chopper, who seemed somewhat mystified. He said he had no palm fronds in his home.

But then he revealed what the people here had long believed to be the real use of the exported palms. The juices in the stems and leaves are extracted, he explained in a conspiratorial whisper, and then turned into a special mixture that is used to stain greenbacks green.

"This is how you color your dollars," he said, waving a palm.

Via qassandra: A Little Birdy Told Me. Hee!

Also by Tatsuya Ishida: I Heckle You Now.

Over dinner, I finally read "Darwin's God", a NYT Magazine essay by Robin Marantz Henig that appeared on 3/4. Three things caught my eye in particular:

Scott Atran's "magic box" experiment [N.B. Atran is himself an atheist]:

...sometimes he presents students with a wooden box that he pretends is an African relic. "If you have negative sentiments toward religion," he tells them, "the box will destroy whatever you put inside it." Many of his students say they doubt the existence of God, but in this demonstration they act as if they believe in something. Put your pencil into the magic box, he tells them, and the nonbelievers do so blithely. Put in your driver’s license, he says, and most do, but only after significant hesitation. And when he tells them to put in their hands, few will.

If they don’t believe in God, what exactly are they afraid of?

Another box experiment, this time by Justin Barrett:

Barrett showed young children a box with a picture of crackers on the outside. What do you think is inside this box? he asked, and the children said, "Crackers." Next he opened it and showed them that the box was filled with rocks. Then he asked two follow-up questions: What would your mother say is inside this box? And what would God say?

As earlier theory-of-mind experiments already showed, 3- and 4-year-olds tended to think Mother was infallible, and since the children knew the right answer, they assumed she would know it, too. They usually responded that Mother would say the box contained rocks. But 5- and 6-year-olds had learned that Mother, like any other person, could hold a false belief in her mind, and they tended to respond that she would be fooled by the packaging and would say, "Crackers."

And what would God say? No matter what their age, the children, who were all Protestants, told Barrett that God would answer, "Rocks." This was true even for the older children, who, as Barrett understood it, had developed folkpsychology and had used it when predicting a wrong response for Mother. They had learned that, in certain situations, people could be fooled — but they had also learned that there is no fooling God.

Last but not least, the word "spandrel":

...it originally referred to the V-shaped structure formed between two rounded arches. The structure is not there for any purpose; it is there because that is what happens when arches align.

In architecture, a spandrel can be neutral or it can be made functional. Building a staircase, for instance, creates a space underneath that is innocuous, just a blank sort of triangle. But if you put a closet there, the under-stairs space takes on a function, unrelated to the staircase’s but useful nonetheless. Either way, functional or nonfunctional, the space under the stairs is a spandrel, an unintended byproduct.

"Natural selection made the human brain big," [Stephen Jay Gould wrote, "but most of our mental properties and potentials may be spandrels — that is, nonadaptive side consequences of building a device with such structural complexity."

The possibility that God could be a spandrel offered Atran a new way of understanding the evolution of religion. But a spandrel of what, exactly?

There's a poem in there somewhere.

Via mingbutterfly: a Harry Potter couple in costume. Double hee!

Comments

[etrangere.livejournal.com]

If they don’t believe in God, what exactly are they afraid of?
When I was in Anthropology class we studied this concept of "Je sais bien... mais quand même", which came from Manami (sp?) who was a psychoanalyste, but the concept was extremely relevant to lots of Belief phenomenons. The idea is, about a lot of things which relate to religion, magic or superstition (or however you want to call these things, anthropology typically doesn't make the difference and call them all Religions) people would say : Je sais bien que la boîte ne va pas detruire ma main, mais quand même je préfère ne pas risquer ma main!
(I do know that the box won't destroy my hand, but even so I'd rather not risk it)
It works with a phenomenal number of things, like : I do know that astrology doesn't work, but even so, I like to read my horoscope.
or : I do know that God doesn't exist, but even so, sometimes I pray to Him."

Believes is never in black and white, in yes or no. People don't jus believe or disbelieve. There's a lot of room for contradictions and paradoxes and variations depending on context and the time of the day.

[mechaieh.livejournal.com]

...mais quand même je préfère ne pas risquer ma main!

*nods* Something else that's occurred to me is that I would probably react very badly were I personally forced to participate in the magic box experiment myself -- in part because I strongly dislike being pushed into playing games to begin with, however benign (especially any situation where I feel I'm about to be pressured into self-revelation and pseudo-analysis). I wouldn't want to put my hand in the box because I don't trust people. (And, for that matter, neither do I necessarily trust God. *grim smile* At least as presented above, one could be a believer and still end up missing a paw, since "belief" and "negative sentiments toward religion" aren't mutually exclusive.)

All the same, there's something about that experiment that grabs me, as an observer, and I think it may have to do with how it's in some ways a converse of "there are no atheists in foxholes," a saying I've always detested. I think I like how it can bring out the uncertainty of (un)belief, since there do seem to be so many people who regard belief (and trust, and faith, and love) as an all-or-nothing, light-switch-on-or-off state, and that tends to make me twitch, regardless of whether that belief or attachment is centered upon the powers of a deity or a diet or DNA.

[etrangere.livejournal.com]

Oh boy, I haven't read the rest of the article (not accessible without registration), but I assumed the people in the experiment were volunteers, not random people forced to take part. Not that I reread it I see the part where it's students (people who are in his charge then...) that's very tacky. :(

Word on not trusting people.

The whole pressuing into self-revelation vibe, as you say, is definitly annoying.

think I like how it can bring out the uncertainty of (un)belief, since there do seem to be so many people who regard belief (and trust, and faith, and love) as an all-or-nothing, light-switch-on-or-off state, and that tends to make me twitch, regardless of whether that belief or attachment is centered upon the powers of a deity or a diet or DNA.
Quite ^^

[nigita.livejournal.com]

Spandrel: I was so pleased to read that there is a word for this idea, and that the word fits the concept so well.