Seen Elsewhere

I’ve been trying to follow the discussion between Norman Geras of Normblog and Ophelia Benson of Butterflies and Wheels on whether or not there are good bits of religion which can be evaluated separately from the bad bits. It’s an interesting discussion, but not one I fully understand.

If I understand it correctly the discussion is whether or not faith is on balance a good or a bad things depending on the outcomes of faith. To over-simplify you can draw up two lists, place things like Christians helping Jews in the second World War in the good column and things like the Spanish Inquisition in the bad column. If the good list is longer than the bad list then faith is, on the whole, good. I’m not sure that is a good method for examining faith. It’s rather like deciding whether a piano is a good musical instrument by balancing Scott Joplin against Richard Clayderman. I wonder if a better approach would be to work out if faith is a good way of getting to desirable outcomes. To borrow the piano, if you decide for some implausible but analogically convenient reason that blue notes are a social benefit, would a piano be a good method to achieve them?

I’m not convinced that deciding social policy through faith is a good thing as it strikes me as dogmatic and I’m not sure that any dogma is a good thing. However, in her most recent post on the subject she points out that faith could motivate people to act against slavery when it might not have been good sense, from a self-preservation point of view, to do so.

On a similar note I’ve been reading Sam Harris‘s The End of Faith. So far it’s a very ugly book. Normally that would be an insult, but the topics he deals with include medieval torture, the burning of heretics or women who forget to cover their head while sitting at home and so on. By and large it’s well-grounded, though one section did seem to veer into the realms of “what a bloke down the pub told me about Iraqis”. It’s also very disturbing in places so it’s not one that I can read for long periods.

Coturnix of the re-styled Science and Politics has introduced me to LabLit. I almost saw another week disappear when I saw that Seed is having a fiction competition. Fortunately I remembered that I can’t plot and thus never get beyond “It was a dark and stormy night“. There’s more on LabLit at LabLit.com.

The Little Professor has an eye-opening post on Plagiary. I spent Christmas trying to come up with synoptic exams for the i-Science course. This post highlights a problem which we’re trying to avoid but perhaps hadn’t framed as well as we could in meetings. A lot of exams do emphasise the regurgitation of fact. The freedom on working on an off-the-wall course is that you can try and experiment to come up with assessments that do the job of seeing what the student has learned rather than having exams only because everyone expects exams.

Finally via Nvgae Ciceronianae, linking to CNN and Orbis Quintus, linking to MSNBC comes a very serious story on the destruction of Qing (pronounced ching?) vases in a museum. Remember if you laugh at this you’re a very bad person. I link to the BBC as they have a ‘before’ picture.