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That human beings are hardwired to behave certain ways, and that each generation sees history the way it wants to see it, are today's topics...-KS

Think Again: God
Karen Armstrong, Foreign Policy
"God Is Dead."
No. When Friedrich Nietzsche announced the death of God in 1882, he thought that in the modern, scientific world people would soon be unable to countenance the idea of religious faith. By the time The Economist did its famous “God Is Dead” cover in 1999, the question seemed moot, notwithstanding the rise of politicized religiosity -- fundamentalism -- in almost every major faith since the 1970s. An obscure ayatollah toppled the shah of Iran, religious Zionism surfaced in Israel, and in the United States, Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority announced its dedicated opposition to “secular humanism.”

But it is only since Sept. 11, 2001, that God has proven to be alive and well beyond all question -- at least as far as the global public debate is concerned. With jihadists attacking America, an increasingly radicalized Middle East, and a born-again Christian in the White House for eight years, you’ll have a hard time finding anyone who disagrees. Even The Economist’s editor in chief recently co-authored a book called God Is Back. While many still question the relevance of God in our private lives, there’s a different debate on the global stage today: Is God a force for good in the world?

So-called new atheists such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens have denounced religious belief as not only retrograde but evil; they regard themselves as the vanguard of a campaign to expunge it from human consciousness. Religion, they claim, creates divisions, strife, and warfare; it imprisons women and brainwashes children; its doctrines are primitive, unscientific, and irrational, essentially the preserve of the unsophisticated and gullible.

These writers are wrong -- not only about religion, but also about politics -- because they are wrong about human nature. Homo sapiens is also Homo religiosus. As soon as we became recognizably human, men and women started to create religions. We are meaning-seeking creatures. While dogs, as far as we know, do not worry about the canine condition or agonize about their mortality, humans fall very easily into despair if we don’t find some significance in our lives. Theological ideas come and go, but the quest for meaning continues. So God isn’t going anywhere. And when we treat religion as something to be derided, dismissed, or destroyed, we risk amplifying its worst faults. Whether we like it or not, God is here to stay, and it’s time we found a way to live with him in a balanced, compassionate manner...
(Nov-Dec issue 2009)
EB contributor Graham Strouts sent in this article which was written in response to Karen Armstrong.

A City Unbottled: Mary Beard's Pompeii
Joy Connolly, The Nation
Visit the ruins of Pompeii today, stroll to the famous "Villa of the Mysteries," and you will discover a room of enigmatic frescoes gleaming in the dim light, their crimsons and golds seeming as rich and resplendent as if they were painted yesterday. In a sense, they were: the walls of the room were heavily and repeatedly retouched, waxed and varnished with petroleum when they were discovered a century ago. The frescoes are typical of Pompeii's charms, the way its many relics seem to testify to the constancy of human invention and encourage us to forget the passage of time. Stroll around the site a little more, and you'll come across recognizable kitchenware, medical instruments and even graffiti: stickmen doodled in a doorway at the level of a child's eye, a naked Venus painted on a bake shop wall like a centerfold pinned up in a modern garage, the lament (or is it a boast?) "Atimetus got me pregnant."

But as Mary Beard shows in The Fires of Vesuvius, her marvelous excavation of Pompeii's history, the city is rarely what it is billed to be. A leading historian of Roman culture, a prolific essayist and an irrepressible blogger, Beard punctures conventional pieties about history and culture with formidable scholarly authority, always paying keen attention to the layering effects of the passage of time. Her Parthenon, published in 2003, wove unfamiliar episodes in the temple's history, notably its life as a mosque starting in the fifteenth century, into the tale of the monument's makeover into the quintessential icon of Western civilization. The Roman Triumph, from 2007, reassessed the sources for the eye-popping imperial parade billed as a triumph in shows like HBO's Rome, complete with horn-blasting legionaries and girls scattering rose petals. Beard's purpose was to expose how the legalistic, institution-minded bias of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historians of the classical era attributed to the civic life of imperial Rome a far more regularized and ideologically orthodox dimension than it is likely to have enjoyed through most of its existence.

With The Fires of Vesuvius, Beard has produced a lusciously detailed, erudite account of life in ancient Pompeii, and in keeping with her earlier work, she first clears the evidentiary ground. She reveals how a city badly roughed up by earthquakes, rebuilt, shaken again, partly evacuated, blasted and blanketed by volcanic ash from Vesuvius in 79 CE, then tunneled into, looted and finally forgotten was rediscovered in the eighteenth century, excavated, rebuilt, bombed by Allied forces in 1943 and reconstructed once more, becoming the "city in a bottle" dramatically if misleadingly packaged for tourists. (It was declared a World Heritage Site by Unesco in 1997.) Sensitive to the fragility of evidence, Beard frankly admits that much about Pompeii, even the exact date of its destruction in 79, will remain unknown. The eyewitness account of the younger Pliny, who wrote that his naturalist uncle died getting a closer look at Vesuvius on August 24-25, is undermined by medieval manuscript variants recording several different dates and the on-site discovery of autumnal vegetables and a coin minted later in the year. Beard insists on only one thing: "'Our' Pompeii is not a Roman city going about its business, then simply 'frozen in time' as so many guidebooks and tourist brochures claim. It is a much more challenging and intriguing place."

...In the wake of modernity's messy experiments with empire, this idealized image of Rome has grown tarnished, but the tendency to equate the "good Rome" with its elite dream of civic virtue and cultural cohesiveness persists. This goes beyond the fantasies of republican liberty promoted by sword-and-sandal spectacles like Gladiator. Recent interest among political theorists in the Roman tradition of republican thought, for example, has revived the idea that the essence of Rome's legacy is its ideal of community bound together by zeal for self-government and a deliberative consensus regarding the common good. Michael Sandel argues in Democracy's Discontent that republican ideals offer a promising corrective to our hyper-proceduralized, impoverished civic life. Even Cullen Murphy, whose popular book Are We Rome? rightly describes the empire as a sprawling, diverse place, suggests that the United States might be able to evade the plagues that slowly ate away at Rome by fortifying "institutions that promote assimilation" and by establishing a national service program for American youth, a modern version of Rome's ancient military ethic. "'We're all in it together' is a spirit that Rome lost," Murphy warns.

Perhaps. But the compellingly realistic picture of communal cohesion that Beard paints, a family-focused network of small-town loyalties, seems unlikely to strike many of us nowadays as exemplary. And as she notes, the idea that ancient Mediterranean societies were intensely politicized, with debate heating up taverns and the Forum, stands up shakily against evidence like the highly formulaic election posters inscribed in red and black paint all over Pompeii's walls. These seem as likely to have been encouraged by obligations to patrons, family members and friends as by enthusiasm for particular ideologies or policies. With her characteristically intuitive grasp of human foible and fraud, Beard takes note of several posters among the more than 2,500 found so far that strike her as the products of late-night carousing or negative campaigning, announcing the support of barmaids, runaway slaves and pickpockets for a few unlucky candidates no doubt dismayed by the trick publicity...
(21 Oct 2009)

Why we don’t do much about climate change
Kate Mackenzie, Financial Times
A fascinating paper from the World Bank looks at the question of how people understand climate change and change their behaviour accordingly - or more often, don’t.

Climate change, the paper argues, is an anthropogenic problem, so the solutions need to be anthropogenic too. Instead, current talk of solutions focuses almost exclusively on economics and on technical solutions - but rarely on individual behaviour. And individual decisions, such as travel, heating, and food purchases, result in about 40 per cent of OECD greenhouse gas emissions.

Of course we are bombarded with exhortations to change our behaviour, but the net effect has been slight. Awareness of, and concern about, climate change is growing, but so are driving, flying, and so on.

So if people know more, and they worry more, why don’t they do more? Part of the problem, argues author Andrea Liverani, is assuming that information leads to action. In fact, information doesn’t even necessarily lead to understanding...
(27 Oct 2009)
You can access the World Bank report here.