This explains a lot

Yet another local letter to the editor:

President Barack Obama's recent trip to the Middle East brought back memories of an article I read in the July 21, 2008, issue of Newsweek. The title of the article was “Finding His Faith.”

This interview occurred on an airplane during then-Sen. Obama's trip to Europe while waging his presidential campaign. Mr. Obama stated that 12 percent of Americans erroneously believed he was a Muslim. He had accepted Christ and was a Christian. However, the article goes on to say that just because he was a Christian it had not stopped him from asking questions, because there was the possibility that he could be wrong.

No born-again believer thinks there is the possibility that he may be wrong. This statement leads me to believe that President Obama may in fact be a Muslim and at some point in his career he will admit it, but not as long as he thinks it would be harmful to his political future.

Delusional, prone to conspiracy theories, and happy to trumpet it in the newspaper. Personally, I'm happy to find out that no born-again is ever wrong.

Grading standards

My semester has been over for a couple of weeks or so and the grading is all finished, but I have compatriots at other schools who are only now struggling with the last sets of essays and exams to put marks on. And, if Facebook is good for nothing else, it does at least let them share their frustrations. Here are a few of my favorite recent updates/comments:

In my class, a "C" means, "I can tell that you know what class you're in, as well as what planet you live on, you've clearly attended sometimes and you have a fuzzy grasp of the subject, although you've probably opened the book rarely if at all. Either you should not be in college because you are constitutionally incapable of thinking, or you are so incorrigibly lazy that you should be treated with electro-shock therapy. You deserve to fail but we need to retain students. A "B" grade means that you've put in a modest effort but you still don't get that you're in college and not junior high school. You don't want to learn but you know you need a college degree if you want to go into sales. An "A" means that you've done the minimal amount of work necessary for a college student, a performance for which you would receive a "C" if I was teaching this class 50 years ago. But, congratulations, I'm OK and you're OK!"

Best excuse for poor class attendance yet: "I had a bad case of poison ivy that lasted two months. I couldn't get to your class in the morning because it was so intense."

X would really appreciate it if students would lose the following phrase when begging for something to raise their grade: "I'll do whatever it takes."

Tell them "what it takes" might be a brain transplant...

and, of course

The response to "Whatever it takes" is "clearly not, or we wouldn't be having this conversation"

Why submitting papers is like dating

Drek shares with us an amusingly (perhaps even cruelly) accurate analogy between submitting articles to a journal and asking out that girl you liked in high school:

On the one hand, you're elated, full of the hope that she will say yes.... At the same time, however, there's that sudden gut-wrenching feeling of terror where the back of your brain screams, "Oh shit! What did I just do?!!?

Unaffiliated? Really?

Since when do people unaffiliated with a religion attend religious services weekly? This is but one question I have about the Pew Forum "Faith in Flux" study on religious affiliation in the US and the NY Times commentary on it by Charles Blow.

But let's back up a bit. According to both the Pew Form executive summary and the op-ed piece, one of the major findings we should be paying attention to is that "the unaffiliated have one of the lowest retention rates of any of the major religious groups, with most people who were raised unaffiliated now belonging to one religion or another." In addition, 51% of the people who went from unaffiliated to affiliated did so because "their spiritual needs were not being met." Later we will see how this vague characterization is used as a club against the unaffiliated.

First, though, to unpack some of the numbers. For example, when did the unaffiliated become affiliated? For a great many, well before they left childhood:

Almost one-third (32%) of those who have become religiously affiliated after an unaffiliated childhood joined their current faith as a minor, including 19% who did so before reaching age 13. But only 10% of those who have become affiliated with a religion after an unaffiliated childhood say it was mostly their parents’ decision.

Doesn't exactly sound like an unaffiliated childhood to me, if one-fifth are becoming affiliated before age 13. In addition, 23% of the formerly unaffiliated indicate that they attended religious services at least weekly during childhood. Again, how is that unaffiliated? It sounds to me like there needs to be some quality control in the survey--self-identification as unaffiliated is one thing, but if it's an inaccurate self-identification, doesn't that pretty well bugger the numbers coming out of the study?

If we now look at how this study is being wielded, we learn from Charles Blow that

While science, logic and reason are on the side of the nonreligious, the cold, hard facts are just so cold and hard.

and

We are more than cells, synapses and sex drives. We are amazing, mysterious creatures forever in search of something greater than ourselves.

Wait, wait--if we are just cells and synapses (the sex drives being an emergent property of the other two), how does that make us any less amazing? We've got a lot of cells and a lot of synapses acting in complicated, amazing ways, and we're not sure how everything works, so I guess that also makes us mysterious. But why stop there? Why not probe that mystery? Why leave it a mystery? And how does investigating that mystery stop us from being part of something greater than ourselves--families, communities, ecosystems, the entire cosmos?

The lack of imagination comes not from the non-religious--those who can see themselves as part of landscape of the natural world and all its complexities, who can unweave the rainbow and still see the beauty in it. No, the lack of imagination comes from those who want to put all this complexity in a box labeled "Mystery, God-stuff." So, Mr. Blow, I will kindly disagree with you when you say "The nonreligious could learn a few things from religion." I'm too busy learning how cells and synapses and molecules make amazing things, and I'm not about to give that up.

The irony of extra credit

If the extra credit assignments you provide are not just busy work, the students who are most in need of the extra credit are precisely those students least able to complete the extra assignment capably.