Einstein on Science and Religion

http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm

Science and Religion

Stanley Fish hits the nail on the head with his newest post on the false dichotomy between science and religion. His essay is subtly tinged with the same snarky, self-righteous, combative mood that I experience when provoked by individuals who cannot accept that being scientific -- in the sense of setting all presuppositions aside, observing the world directly, and reporting those observations unencumbered by the limitations of cultural-historical bias, figurative language, or one's own unexamined pre-conceptions -- is either not entirely possible or is not necessarily the highest intellectual virtue.

I cannot fully explain why the issue has become inflammatory for me, since I rarely claim allegiance to any special religious tradition, outside of an ethnic and historical affiliation with a particular Protestant sect. I certainly have no desire to defend the logic of those who would claim that the earth is four-thousand-some years old based on numbers given in the Bible. Perhaps it is simply that the religion I grew up with had nothing to do with scouring the Bible for facts about the natural world or chronologies of ancient kings, and everything to do with imagining justice and participating in practices and dialogues that reflect love (a quality so important to that community that it is personified in language as divinity itself). For many of my peers, religion has served a wholly different, though no less worthy, purpose (for example, one friend conceives of religion as a way of rooting herself to the Earth and to those aspects of life that are cyclical rather than linear in nature; another friend's religion helps him to think through his own personal faults and shortcomings and to seek a sense of wholeness). The varieties of religious experience are many, and the simple-minded characterization of religion as a blissful fairy tale, or worse yet, as a smoke screen standing between a subject and reality, is simply a misreading. Religion is way more interesting than that.

It is equally plausible, I guess, that I am just being defensive. After all, the logic applied by those who would dismiss religion as a "fairy tale" or a "smoke screen" might also be used to suggest that the only old books worth reading are the ones that make truth claims, and not only that, but the ones whose truth claims are still considered true by today's truth-claiming elite. And that is a perspective that an aspiring student of philosophy and literature can hardly afford to accept.

This I will admit: There are plenty of smart ways to be an atheist. But denying religion its complexity by reducing it to a set of claims about history or the natural world is not one of them.

American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009

Here's the cap-and-trade bill as it stands now:
http://energycommerce.house.gov/Press_111/20090515/hr2454.pdf

Markup of this bill by the House Energy and Commerce Committee begins next Monday. Chairman Waxman wants to have it completed by Memorial Day.

Things I find more interesting than work

Moby-Dick
Emerson
Westward expansion
History of science, technology
Influence of Europe upon American thought in the 19th century
Natural resources
Pragmatism
Romantic poetry
Shelley's "In Defense of Poetry"
Woolf
Dostoevsky
The Enlightenment
Exploration narratives
The Old Testament (esp. theories of authorship)
Theories of culture, multiculturalism, global community
Relationship of literature to literary theory
Argumentation

"Mississippi Drift: River Vagrants in the Age of Wal-Mart"

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/03/0081945

More Rorty

http://archives.acls.org/op/op10rorty.htm