The following two videos are from Whitacre’s intro to the project and a finished version:

Why do we do what we do? Some might respond that asking such questions is a typical first-world problem, that it’s the modern equivalent to trying to figure out how many angels can dance on the head because with so many people going hungry in the world and in our own country, how dare we waste time entertaining such things as “motivation.” It should be pretty damn clear that we do what we do so that we can feed ourselves and our families and keep out the dangers of the outer world. It’s all about higher and higher levels of survival. Once you have enough bread for the day, then you need to make sure that you have enough bread for the week and then once you have that you need to make sure that you never go without having enough bread. But can one ever have enough bread?

During 1980s and early 1990s I worked for a local telco as a well-paid technician. We worked in a union-shop so whenever we worked overtime we got time-and-a-half and if we worked enough over-time early in the week we could reach double-time. With construction booming in Southern California there was a lot of over-time to be had. I noticed that the technicians who were the best at what they did liked getting the over-time pay but were motivated to do the quality job that they did because they liked fixing problems and liked being good at it. The technicians who were just about getting the over-time pay rarely were the ones one could count on to get the job done right the first time. In fact, for all of the time they put in, they could be guaranteed as spending most of their time avoiding work. And neither group like having management breathing down their necks, telling them what to do at every turn. Even the self-motivated ones would let things slip through the cracks because micro-managing stole their incentive to do better. Just like the video said, getting properly compensated helped, but it was no guarantee that the job would get done. When I left the phone company to go teach we were working so much overtime that it was almost a 50% cut in pay for me to leave. And even much later when I left California to come to Florida I took another huge cut in pay. One has to make a living and should be able to do so without resorting to endless part-time gigs, but it’s not about the pay. It’s unfortunate that it’s generally only highly funded companies like Google, where they have a 20% time policy where employees can work on personal projects for 20% of their on-job time, where they explore such things as “motivation.” Too bad.

In Bad Faith, part 8: The Case for God – Not What You Think

I think that Armstrong did such a great job summarizing the book in her NPR/Fresh Air interview that the book feels a bit ponderous. What I mean is that this is a book that one really needs to pay attention to and no play as background music (ack, stupid multitasking lifestyle). Armstrong takes the reader from the very beginning evidences of “god thoughts” found in the pre-historic caves of Lascaux, to the new-atheists like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, spending a goodly bit of time going through the Greek, Asian, and post-medieval schools of thought that may not be familiar to the reader.

So, as a former Loyola Marymount religious studies major with a B.A. in Biblical Studies from Biola University and several quarters of study at Fuller Seminary toward an MA in Theology and a piss-pour background in the Greek and Latin Classics (no ones fault but my own), I greatly appreciated Armstrong’s academic, non-polemic, recitation of pre-history and history of religion on this planet. Yeah, that’s the scope of this book. I’m very interested in her other books on Islam and Buddhism to see how deep she dives into these religions where I’m greatly lacking in my own understanding.

Thoughts that struck me as I listened to the book, mainly how every generation and every great thinker felt compelled to re-interpret God based on their own recent history, cultural and personal, and their own cultural problems. For example, how different would modern Christianity be if Augustine had not had such a problem with his pre-conversion sexual appetites, how would the relationship between God and man be cast differently if Augustine hadn’t promoted the idea of Original Sin and demonized sexuality in general, making it a sin except for the purpose of conception? What would have happened if Emperor Constantine had not chosen to use Christianity as a unify force in his divided empire, thus forcing provincial Christianity to agree on which books belonged in the scriptures, the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth and what would be orthodox and what would be heretical? How differently would history have been had Christianity remained a Jewish sect instead of a world political power? And every time there was a political or natural disaster there seemed to be gigantic shifts in thought with conservatives abandoning the silent God and liberal’s looking for a literal simplistic God to find comfort from.

The greatest error in our search for the Divine seems to be that all of us, skeptic and believer, have made the mistake of assuming that our understanding of religion and the Divine has always been the way we presently see things. Biblical inerrancy, literal divine intervention, God as a Being, the idea of One Truth, religion as belief system instead of daily practice, the after-life, rationalism versus belief: these are all tenets of faith that many of us hold onto believing that changing any one of them invalidates the whole idea of Faith. And yet, many of these ideas have a date in history when they caught on, thus showing that there was a time when people did not, for example, hold to the idea that there was only one truth or that the scriptures had to be perfect in every word and teaching. It might be surprising to some that there have been faithful Christians who do not believe that Jesus was God incarnate. I know, shock. In fact, not at all like the superstitious primitives who saw gods in every stone and stick, it may surprise some that some ancients understood that one could not reduce God to Person because God doesn’t make sense as someone like themselves only bigger.

So, are you tired of the literalistic infantile religion that you find on the TV day and night? Are you unconvinced that it’s NOT all DNA and chemical reactions? Are you tired of the petty divisive warring between small minded sects with guns? Well, then maybe it’s time, in the words of Neo, to free ones mind from narrow assumptions of ones cultural and personal past and entertain thoughts that it’s a much bigger universe than one can even understand, but that one is a part of this much bigger existence.

Also, it should go without saying that it’s long past time for fat self-absorbed Christians to get over themselves and express their beliefs beginning by welcoming a Muslim into their home and giving a good portion of their wealth away to the poor and shut the hell up until they’ve done the first things that their Messiah told them to do. Additionally, It’s past time for the faithful from all beliefs to stop letting the Fundamentalists misrepresent what the Founders of their Faith intended. Rest assured, when you kill, hate or persecute in the name of God, you aren’t speaking or acting for any god beyond your own personal sickness. And that goes for those of you who hate someone who doesn’t agree with your politics or, horror of horrors, doesn’t agree with your sexuality (or lack thereof). To use a phrase popular with a few friends, if the founders could, they’d bitch-slap these presumptive crazies. Oh wait, that’d just lend credence toward their belief in rewarding violence for violence. Oh what the hell, slap away!

god help us! Getting back to Armstrong’s book; Meaning and data, mythos and logos, it’s not a mistake that every culture has examples of this phenomenon. Funny, thinking of previous readings, it’s a bit like the left and right hemispheres of the human brain, we don’t do particularly well when only one hemisphere is “in charge.” The same would seem to be true of human cultures that advocate only one way of understanding reality, religion or secularism. As with the human mind, the two parts must communicate and influence each other or the whole will suffer and fail. Interesting. This business of God and religion is not at all what i would have at first thought.

Karen Armstrong at TED: The Golden Rule

Sources:
image: Karen Armstrong. http://shelleyadelle.wordpress.com/2009/03/26/belief-to-love-to-prize-to-hold-dear/ retrieved on 3/11/2010

image: Padre.jpg microsoft clipart

TED video: Karen Armstrong: Let’s revive the Golden Rule. http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/karen_armstrong_let_s_revive_the_golden_rule.html retrieved on 3/11/2010

The Role of Technology in Education

As you work through this course’s reading assignments and create your Udutu project you might notice that you might be the only one among your peers working at such a high level of expectation as far as the integration and useage of technology in the day-to-day functioning of a classroom. Why is that? The normal excuse on the part of educators tends to be the lack of time and on the part of administration the lack of funds. And even when technology is brought into the classroom the purchasing process tends to be such a top-down “what do we need now” event, lacking any long-term vision or implementation plan that it’s no suprise that thirty-years after the arrival of the first small computers into the classroom, we’re still having this discussion.

One of the voices of dissent is astronomer Clifford Stoll, who feels that the last thing we need is to have students equate staring at a picture of the Louvre on a computer screen with anything remotely similar to experiencing the real thing. When Dr. Stoll wrote Silicon Snake Oil (1996) the Internet was in just in its commercial infancy, NetDay had 20,000 volunteers wiring local schools to the Internet and there was great buzz about improving education by improving access to the Information SuperHighway. At the time his concern was whether this investment in infrastructure could be better spent on teachers instead of tools. Over a dozen years later, with institutions flying to “online learning” as a way to cheaply expand programs without having to invest in more facilities or faculty, the question still remains whether sound pedagogy is even entering into these decisions.

The following videos look at the role of technology in education, but not in such a “either/or” point of view. The first video harkens from the dawn of the small computer era when Seymore Papert developed something called Logo to teach programming to children:

This next video is one man’s crazy idea to enable third world children to completely skip industrialization and move from agrarian culture to the information age. Another alumni from the MIT Media Lab, Nicholas Negroponte talks about the deployment of the OLPC (One Laptop per Child) program:

In this last video the protagonist looked outside his office window, to a wall that separated his nice surroundings from a slum and thought, I wonder what would happen if… Thus began Sugata Mitra‘s “Hole in the Wall/Digital Divide“ studies:

Please review these videos and come to our Wimba session ready to talk about the Role of Technology in Education.

Sources:

* The Internet? Bah! Hype alert: Why cyberspace isn’t, and will never be, nirvana, by Clifford Stoll | NEWSWEEK (From the magazine issue dated Feb 27, 1995). http://www.newsweek.com/id/106554 retrieved on 12/7/2009

* Youtube video: Seymour Papert 1983 posted by cynthiaso. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOf4EMN6-XA retrieved on 12/7/2009

* TED video: Negroponte takes OLPC to Colombia. http://www.ted.com/talks/nicholas_negroponte_takes_olpc_to_colombia.html retrieved on 12/7/2009

* TED video: Sugata Mitra shows how kids teach themselves. http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_themselves.html retrieved on 12/7/2009

In Bad Faith, Part 1: It’s the Accent, Isn’t It?

My brother warned me against reading this book unless I was serious about examining my faith. I can only imagine how confusing my circuitous route into and out of and then back into and later out of Faith must appear to my sibling(s). I mean, given that I went against my parents’ wishes and switched from Catholic Loyola Marymount University to Fundamentalist Protestant Biola University, and instead of getting something practical like a B.A. in Engineering I got one in Biblical Studies. This was definitely something more important going on here than a passing adolescent fad. But having gone from highly academic Loyola to wanting-to-be-more-academic Biola (in the early 80s) I learned to approach my Faith and the Bible from a more scientific/academic approach than just a devotional approach. Two of my favorite books from this era were Robert Alter’s The Art Of Biblical Narrative and Robert Mapes Anderson’s Vision of the Disinherited: The Making of American Pentecostalism. So there was always some danger that I was susceptible to things a little beyond the safe confines of devotional reading.

Fast forward twenty-eight years, divorced twenty-five years, failed MA in Theology from Fuller Seminary. second BA in communications/journalism, teaching credential, MA in Educational Technology, failed Ed.D in Educational Technology, re-located from Southern California to Central Florida, I decided against jumping back into the church thing. I needed to find some balance between my experiences of faith and the academic/scientific part of my personality. That’s when I decided to listen to Richard Dawkin’s The God Delusion. Well, actually I watched the TED video first and came away with the sense that this quiet-spoken Englishman could probably get away with almost anything because of our American stereotype that causes us to assume that anyone with said accent is obviously more intelligent than we are. Damn.

The most memorable part of the beginning of the book is the idea/quote, “we didn’t know we had a choice,” and Dawkins wanting to make the case that not believing in God isn’t something to be endured in silence. What follows is a tour de force with side trips to Einstein’s God and whether Science can say anything about Religion. The big idea of the book is that Religion is a vestigial personal/cultural remnant that’s related to the childhood belief in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. Whereas we gave up on the belief in Santa and the Tooth Fairy when we grew up from childhood, we persist in our adult years in a belief in an “Old Man” in Heaven who knows our every thoughts and has a plan for our lives. This isn’t to equate Religion with belief in Santa, it’s just that they seem to serve the same purpose and come from the same part of the human psyche, according to Dawkins.

Dawkins also wrote about his wonderful relationship with his Anglican pastor/headmaster and how that helped him feel free to explore his belief in Science and not see a lack of faith in God as if he was missing something. I have to note that there is a real cultural divide between this educated Brit’s take on Religion and my experience with American Christianity. This fact was brought home to me in a recent conversation with a coworker who was raised in the UK when the coworker commented about how he felt like the reading of Genesis by the Apollo 8 astronauts in 1968 was some kind of put on. He couldn’t see how these astronauts/scientists could seriously be reading from the Bible without a sneer on their faces or in their hearts. To which I have to say that one should not underestimate how deep the religious feelings are among Americans and, contrary to one of Dawkin’s claims, this phenomenon is no respecter of intelligence. There’s most definitely a political efficacy to the practice of Religion in the U.S. (note that there are no self-proclaimed Atheists in the U.S. Senate), but scratch under the surface and one is reminded that this continent was settled by religious refugees.

Thus, Dawkins’ solution, that we refrain from indoctrinating our children with Religion, is just plain silly to an American audience who may fully disregard their religious tenets eight-days a week, but will fully and sometimes violently defend their right to pass on their belief system to the next generation. In fact I’ve seen more than my fair share of marginal Christians reclaim their faith with the arrival of children. One might wonder if they’re not doing this because that’s how they were raised, but that’s kind of how humans do most things and is not limited to religious indoctrination.

So, Dawkins’ take is that given how out of step most religious foundations are with modern life, practitioners must be ignoring the obvious contradictions in order to maintain their belief in the wise old man in the sky. In a word, they are deluding themselves. Alas, to the faithful his words, should one bother to read all the way through this tome, won’t hit home. The skeptic/atheist will feel reaffirmed. But what about the fence-sitter, the person trying to balance a religious upbringing with life in our modern world?

I appreciate Dawkins’ experiences and thought processes. I don’t think that he has a real understanding on my particular journey. He might be right that it was my upbringing that influenced me to interpret the narrative of my life to include god. But given the enduring strength of this vestigial delusion, maybe this is more than a cultural hold-over, more than a relic mistake handed off from father to son. Maybe it’s something that we’re born with.

To Be Continued…

image capture by playerx

Following is a video of Clay Shirkey at TED that my student included in her blog post:

Sources:

EDM613 wk4: Clay Shirkey and Twitter by Alice Keeler, http://www.selfservebaker.com/mathblog/?p=156 Retrieved 7/3/2009

Video: Clay Shirkey at TED, http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/575

image: Twitter Fail Whale is back by playerx, http://www.flickr.com/photos/playerx/3090739418/ Retrieved on 7/9/2009

Richard Dawkins: Militant Atheism

This second video is by another Engishman, but one coming for a very different point of view, a point of view that I more closely identify with.

Rev. Tom Honey – God as “In” and Not “Agent”

I vaguely remember studying pantheism and animism back in my more “black and white” era and rejecting the position because it didn’t seem too “Biblical” and seemed to be used by crazies to say that they were “god.” That part hasn’t changed, but my confidence about anyone’s ability to rightly divine biblical text or that the whole truth is in the text, has change.

At the same time I’m weary and untrusting of the arrogance conveyed by many skeptic who believe that all problems and solutions can be proven through rational means alone. That seems to be just the same mistake by their religious counterparts. The world/universe is much, much greater that you can even begin to understand.

So there is this part of me that wants to pray, to continue to have this intimate dialogue with the Divine but there is another part of me convinced that no one is listening. Last time I attempted to deal with this duality, over twenty-years ago, I choose to ignore the divine and just live from day to day. Over the past five years I’ve come to think that I lost a lot in that compromise, particularly my artistic passion and my connectedness with others.

I wonder if I can be like the latter speaker and appropriate my former passion for the divine with an understanding quite different from my fundamentalist roots. If there is no “Santa in the Sky” how do I direct this part of myself that senses a connection to something much bigger than myself? I rationalized it away twenty-years ago, called myself an Agnostic and wandered in the desert for fifteen-years. I want to do much better this time around, especially in view of the fact that I may not have another twenty-years to fuck around before my time on this little globe is completed. You’d think at the ripe old age of 50 I’d have a better handle on this, but I do not. I hope that I find that oasis (or build that oasis) with enough time to enjoy and share the fruit of this journey. jbb

The following link was given to me by Full Sail coworker, Linda, who was impressed with Rick Warren‘s ability to present his belief system without sounding “religious.” I appreciated that Warren seemed to respect the venue he was speaking at and addressed his thoughts as not addressing religious issues, but as human issues. Warren came off as firm but nurturing, understanding but uncompromising and very matter of fact, all hallmarks of a somewhat laid back “Seeker Sensitive” California attitude. Enjoy.

Rick Warren @ TED: Living a Life of Purpose

Dan Dennett @ TED (Feb 2006) – The Biological Evolution of Religion

Interestingly for me both of these speakers represent a bifurcating pull in my own thinking between this “matter of fact” Christianity and a more scientific, cultural-anthropology view of things…

Music: “First Prayer” by Randy Stonehill

This shouldn’t be too surprising, given that after getting my B.A. in Biblical Studies at Biola University and several quarters at Fuller Seminary as a Masters of Theology student, I enrolled at Cal State Fullerton as an Anthropology major (which I switched to Communications New/Editorial after a couple semesters). I mean, I completely concur with Warren’s sentiment that there has to be more to this life than the day to day grind. That awareness in me has always led me to pursue an intimate connection with God, whether we’re talking about the musings of a Catholic teenager trying to read the New Testament for the first time or a 40-something playing his guitar and singing with everything he has as part of the Evangelical Sunday worship service. At the same time, I’ve crossed the cultural and religious boundaries so many times in my life that, as big a picture as any belief system tries to establish, I know that it is all more bigger still.

Back five years ago after I’d been calling myself an agnostic for 15-years ago, a good friend and fellow Biola graduate said flatly that she wouldn’t accept this, that I couldn’t deny that all I’d experienced wasn’t true. And she was right. And thus I gradually entered into a second period of spiritual intimacy and learning. But at the same time I could never shake this feeling that the whole practice was just something that we all do to satiate our need to be connected to something bigger than ourselves. Of late, this “maybe I didn’t quite get this right” sense of doubt has pushed me more toward my former skeptical position. Like Morpheus at the end of the second Matrix movie, things didn’t turn out the way I thought the Oracle had pronounced them and this is forcing me to reevaluate everything. Mind you, things are incredibly good with opportunities opening for me, some might say “miraculously,” at just the right time such that some might see this turn of fortunes as a definite sign of God’s favor in my life. And quite frankly I might have agreed with that assessment except that the one person who helped set me back on the path of Faith, the one person I wanted to share this spiritually intimacy with, is most decidedly not a part of my life. And my fortunate move to Florida has ended any possibility of ever seeing the vision of love that I had with her come to fruition. Had it been otherwise and she were with me, I might very well have spent the past six weeks looking for a new church home. So, it’s very personal but it’s not about me. It’s about this emotional connection and contrary recognition that I cannot close my eyes to a bigger picture than my former Bible-quoting self could even begin to understand. I want to understand and right now I seem to have all the “opportunity” in the world to explore what these contradictory pulls mean in my life. Onward and upward. jbb