R. Crumb's Illustrated Genesis.

I've been reading R. Crumb's illustrated version of the Book of Genesis, and I've been meaning to blog about it for a while, because it routinely floors me. Unfortunately, every post I can think to write about it would sound like this:

You know that part when Judah hires a prostitute, and he doesn't know it is his daughter-in-law because she is wearing a veil, and he gets her pregnant, and then when she is going to be burned at the stake for being a whore she says "Judah is totally my baby daddy, and here I've got his ceremonial seal to prove it."

That's fucked up, man.

Crumb totally made the right decision to simply illustrate Genesis at face value. He even portrays God as a man with a long white beard. By taking Genesis at its word, Crumb transforms his amazing comics mojo into a conduit for the total fucked-up-edness that is the Bible.

Also fucked up: the fact that Tamar (the daughter-in-law) is pretending to be some kind of temple prostitute and that her fee is a baby sheep.

"and if you film him from strange angles, he looks quite sinister"

Interview with Alan Moore about his decision to worship a Roman snake god.

a fun moment for a philosophy teacher

So I was presenting Leibniz's argument that we live in the best of all possible worlds to my evening intro class, and I really dug in--gave it the best presentation I could. Suddenly, I believed it. No really. For any change you might think to make in the universe, there is good reason to believe either (1) it actually wouldn't be better or (2) it actually isn't logically possible. Certain facts about human abilities guarantee that this will always be possible. Facts about the need for some optimism in order to act, and about the virtue found in being grateful, and in the limits of our capacity to imagine other worlds and... and...

No wait, I lost it. But for a moment there, I was Leibniz.

Three useful god terms

While checking out the Wikipedia definitions for some terms used in my Eastern Phiosophy class, I came across two new words

Ignosticism is the refusal to decide on the existence of God until someone comes up with a coherent definition of what God is.

Henotheism is the belief that many gods exist, but that only one is deserving of your worship. As near as I can tell, most of the Hebrew bible was written by henotheists, not monotheists.

Meanwhile, my colleague Ben Cordry has coined the term "Deflationary Theism" to describe the viewpoint suggested in Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, that the difference between theism and atheism is merely verbal.

Caroline asked me again why we don't say grace. I told her that grace was a part of a religion I don't believe in. She did not, thankfully, ask the follow up question "what is religion?" This is a question I ask my students regularly, and I ask it because I don't have a very good answer.

Doing Polygamy Badly

Reading this article on the sad fate of boys cast out from the big Fundamentalist Mormon enclave in Colorado and Utah to maintain the gender ratio at a level that allows all the men to have at least three wives, I realized that these guys simply don't know how to run a polygamous society. For most of human history, the species has been both polygamous and patriarchal, but has never had a problem with surplus boys. Most societies avoid this problem by limiting real polygamy to the very high status males and having women marry young and men wait until they are older. If I were leading a crazed religious sect and were motivated primarily by the desire to possess and dominate large numbers of women, I would be quick to impose both of those policies on my flock, just to insure that the operation is sustainable. I think this guy Warren Jeffs simply doesn't know how to be an effective cult leader.

OMG, a textbook fallacy

Check this argument out:

The Rev. Greg Boyd, pastor of Woodland Hills Church in Maplewood: "I thirst for water, and water exists. I hunger for food, and food exists. I hunger and thirst for God, so I concluded that God must exist."

from this interview with Richard Dawkins. The interviewer asks Dawkins what he thinks of this quote. Strangely, Dawkins does not say: "is this the best you could come up with? I despair for the American education system"

In any case, there's one for Reasoning class on Monday.