February 2006 – Page 5

Red States Of Beatitude

The vast majority of us–even those who don’t take the longevity test discussed in the last post–are going to be around for the next four years.

How do we want to spend them?

Being very happy, of course!

So how do we do that?

In comes this year’s annual Pew Research Center’s happiness study, which surveys the population to find out who describes themselves as being "very happy," "pretty happy," or "not too happy" on most days.

It turns out that, overall, the population is 34% very happy, 50% pretty happy, and 15% not too happy (with 1% saying they couldn’t tell).

That’s good news in itself, but where the story gets interesting is looking at which groups within the populace are the most happy.

For example, Republicans are more happy than Democrats. (Big surprise, right?) But this isn’t just because there is a Republican administration right now. Republicans have had a happiness gap over Democrats ever since the annual survey was started back in 1972.

Conservatives (of either party) are happier than liberals (of either party).

People who go to church weekly are happier than people who don’t.

Married people are happier than single people.

People who live in the southern part of the United States are happier than those who live in the northern part.

And people also get happier as household income rises.

There are things that one can’t control that have bearings on reported happiness (health, age, sex, race, etc.), but within what one can control, it seems that the way to best fit the profile of the "very happy" people would be to adapt one’s lifestyle so that you become a married Southern conservative Republican church-goer who has done what is needed to ensure a good household income.

Of course, merely adapting your lifestyle to fit this profile may not make you happy. It may be that people who are natively happy are attracted to these things, rather than these things making people happy.

Or (more likely) it may be some of both. (For example, marriage might be a cause of happiness, while native unhappiness might be a cause of voting for a party that focuses heavily on grievances).

Just food for thought as you spend your next four years.

GET THE STORY.

Four More Years?

No, this isn’t about a presidential election. It’s about something else: Longevity. As you may know, there are people who think that if we can live just a few years longer then developments in medicine and nanotechnology will enable us to live much, much longer than we do today.

But what are the odds that we’ll live through the gap? In fact, what are the odds that we’ll make it through just the next four years?

I’ve known for a while that it would be possible to go consult actuarial tables–the kind that insurance companies use–to get estimates of this kind of thing, but I’ve never done that.

Now someone has come up with a simple test in which you get points based on various factors, and the lower the number of points you get, the lower the chance of you dying in the next four years.

For example, being a man gets you two points right off the bat. Having diabetes gets you one point. Having cancer gets you two points. If you’re sixty to sixty four years of age you get one point (more points with more age). And so on.

The test has some limitations. It really isn’t designed for populations undre fifty years of age, for example, and the population that the study is based on may not be fully representative. The authors of the relevant paper–which appears in the Journal of the American Medical Association–also warn that you shouldn’t try to self-diagnose with this thing because there may be mitigating factors in your case that a doctor could point out to you.

Of course, by announcing the existence of this test publicly, many people will ignore this and do it anyway.

So,

GET THE STORY

and

TAKE THE TEST (IF YOU DARE).

Backwards Learning

I read an interesting article about a theory that holds that when we learn things our brains subconsciously replay these events in reverse order as part of assimilating the new information.

They’ve done studies that have shown that the hippocampus in mice brains does this when the mice are being taught something–like how to run a maze–and the mouse hippocampus apparently works similarly to the human hippocampus, so they suspect the same thing is going on in us.

If I understand it correctly, the theory is that the final moves of a sequence are often the most important for getting a reward (or avoiding a punishment) and so our brains place the most emphasis on those, rather than earlier moves we may do before we get to crunch time.

As a result, our brains focus first on the moves we must perform last.

The article doesn’t mention this, but this may explain why the Pimsleur Method works for learning languages.

Paul Pimsleur discovered that his language students learned better if they memorized words syllable by syllable–backwards.

For example, the Hebrew word for "four" is arba. The way you’d memorize that via Pimsleur is you’d have the syllable –ba repeated for you several times, followed by the syllable ar- repeated for you. Then you’d have the whole arba repeated.

I’ve found in my own language study that doing this seems to help. If I memorize words from the front to the back, I often can’t remember how the word is supposed to end. But if I memorize the word from the back to the front, I don’t have as much trouble.

Like I’m doing with that nice Croatian couple in my Friday night square dance group, whom I’m forcing to teach me bits of Croatian. The Croatian term for "Goodbye," for example is (phonetic spelling only; I’m doing this all aurally) dov-ih-jain-ya. When they taught me that, I locked on to the last syllable, -ya, and made sure I had it firmly fixed in mind. I was then able to retain this word not just for the rest of the night (so that I could surprise them with it when they left) but also retain it through to the next week and on to now.

Relatedly, I’ve also noticed that good square dance teachers make very sure, when they’re teaching a move, to make clear up front where you’re going to end the move. If students don’t have a clear idea of that and try to do just the sequence of steps and arm movements then they frequently end up out of place. So special emphasis needs to be placed on the end of the move in order for students to do it successfully.

(In fact, just last night in round dace class I had a problem because the instructors failed to communicate specifically where a move ends and it was messing me up until I asked them to clarify the ending.)

The story as a whole is quite interesting, so be sure to

GET THE STORY.

Do You Have A Baby Einstein?

If you have been buying Baby Einstein videos in the hopes of turning your child into a miniature genius, or even in the hopes of having a few minutes of peace, you may be interested in reading about the "The $165 Million Scam":

"Back when I was 8 months pregnant with Alex, my mother and I were washing windows outside. I lamented that 21-month-old Andie was getting in my way whenever I needed to do chores around the house. I wasn’t ready to resort to baby videos, but I completely empathized with parents needing their kids out of their hair. Having raised four girls without any educational videos, my mother’s response was simple: have them work along with you. I laughed, thinking surely she must have forgotten what it was like with little kids.

"’Think of your ancestors,’ she said to me as she filled up a bucket with soapy water. ‘What do you think the pioneers did with their children?’

[…]

"But it’s not just parents’ need for breaks that sells Baby Einstein. It’s the pressure we put on ourselves to create the optimum learning environment for our kids, from the minute they are home from the hospital.

[…]

But Dr. [Patricia] Kuhl’s most recent work proves videos ineffective in teaching babies foreign languages. In her July 2003 experiment, Kuhl showed that exposing 10-month-olds to videos and DVDs of native Mandarin Chinese speakers had zero effect on their language development. But if that video is replaced with a living, breathing, person speaking Mandarin, babies showed great learning of that language in a short time period, according to her report. Even though Aigner-Clark had good intentions with her language video, Baby Einstein does not teach babies foreign languages — only live people can do that. And without specifically mentioning the company or its products, Kuhl’s research actually debunks Baby Einstein‘s theory that certain videos could create little ‘Einsteins.’ In The Scientist in the Crib, the trend of making babies smarter is referred to as ‘pseudoscience,’ warning parents to be ‘deeply suspicious of any enterprise that offers a formula for making babies smarter or teaching them more, from flash cards to Mozart tapes … these artificial interventions are at best useless and at worst distractions from the normal interaction between grown-ups and babies’ (Kuhl, et. al., 201)."

GET THE STORY.

Not to mention that using a video as an electronic babysitter or babytutor is a sure-fire way to turn your child into a television addict before he even learns to walk.

Annulment Worries

A reader writes:

I am a convert to the Catholic faith. I was married for many years, but our marriage hit its 5th or 6th really rough spot and I bailed. It had been her before that, but we always got back together, because we thought of the vows and somewhere we did love each other.

I had been reading the early Church Fathers while with her and watching Marcus Grodi. I knew that God wanted me in the Catholic Church. I had found my high school sweetheart by that time. I proceeded to get an Annulment and started RCIA. I received the Annulment and our marriage was blessed in the Catholic Church the same Sunday I was received into the Church.

My current wife says she does not love me and I am not what she wanted in a husband.

My ex-wife really does not want me back due to the annulment. She never understood it and the fact that I have been married is a turn off to her.

I have been listening to apologists on Catholic Radio concerning annulment. I am convinced that there should really be any such animal, especially after a long period of time. I heard one say the other day on a Catholic radio show, that you never get the other one out of your heart if it was a sacramental marriage.

Well there are the facts. Question. Am I living in adultery, and could the Marriage Tribunal been wrong in granting the annulment? I am not willing to give up on the current marriage, but if I was not free to marry and I did, I know it will never work. What does the Church say?

First, let me say that I am very sorry to hear about your situation, and I encourage readers to pray for you and your wife.

I also did not hear what was said on the radio, so I cannot comment directly on it, but if that is what was said then it was a really dumb thing to say. The Church does not teach that valid marriages lead to inseparable emotional bonds. However romantic that idea might be, saying it in public is bound to induce scrupulosity in precisely the kind of people who are in your situation.

The fact is that there can be valid marriages which then break up and one or both of the partners severs all emotional ties with the person to whom they are validly married. Imagine, for example, the case of a person who suffers a bout of mental illness that leaves them severely psychotic and unable to have normal human emotions for anybody, including the spouse.

People also form enduring emotional bonds with all kinds of people, including those they were never married to in the first place. (E.g., two long-term lovers.) The mere fact that there is a continuing emotional bond on some level does not mean that a prior marriage was valid. Emotional bonds do not a marriage make, and it is really dumb to suggest that in public because it is just going to lead people to scruple, as it has in this case.

Conversely, it also is not true that people who were validly married before cannot invalidly remarry and have the new, invalid marriage "work." People who aren’t even married to each other (e.g., two long-term lovers) can have their relationship "work" without marriage even entering into it. Two people who are unwittingly in an invalid union certainly can.

Our culture has a very romanticized view of marriage compared to many cultures, especially historically. In most cultures in world history, romance was something that grew between the spouses after they were married, not something that precededs it and is regarded as its basis. While it’s wonderful for people to fall in love before they are married, there is a danger here of thinking of romance as the basis of a marriage, and when the romance goes away for a while, it can cause the spouses to call their marriage into question needlessly.

The fact that you have an emotional bond on some level to your prior wife does not mean that your marriage to her was valid, and the fact that you are currently having a constrained emotional relationship with your new wife does not mean that you are not validly married to her.

Emotions are simply not determinative of marriage bonds, and thinking that they are leads to needless worries and anxieties.

Nor does the length of time between a marriage and an annulment have anything to do with whether the marriage was valid. Whether the marriage was valid is determined at the moment the parties attempt to contract marriage. How long or short a time they wait before seeking an annulment is not determinative of whether the marriage was valid at the time it was contracted.

The fact of your situation is this: The Catholic Church–the Bride of Christ–looked into your first marriage and, despite giving it the presumption of validity and despite all the safeguards it has in place to prevent declarations of nullity in the case of valid marriages, it found that there were compelling reasons that it was invalid.

While it is true that tribunals are not infallible, it is also true that those who are non-experts in an area have a duty to yield to those who are experts. You are not as expert in these matters as the Church is, and so you are obliged to yield to its judgment in such matters and regard yourself as free to have contracted marriage to your current spouse.

The Church then put its seal of approval on your new marriage–and until such time as you might (God forbid) divorce and receive a new annulment–you are obligated in conscience to regard yourself as a married man and to act accordingly.

You therefore have a duty to put aside your worries (which themselves are a hindrance to fixing your current marital situation), and fulfill your duties as a loving husband to the best of your ability, knowing that God will honor your efforts to do so.

This means that if you need marriage counselling to help your marriage, you go get it. Go to Retrouvaille or talk to a local marriage counselor–whatever it takes. Do all that a husband would be expect to do to save his marriage–and only if it breaks up anyway do you proceed to the question of nullity.

That is not a question that is on the table at this point.

Your obligation is to your very best to keep it from getting onto the table.

Scary Science Stories #3: The Mind Parasites

No this isn’t about Colin Wilson’s Lovecraftian novel The Mind Parasites. It’s about something else.

Suppose that there was a parasite that needed to get into the gut of a cat in order to complete its reproductive cycle.

How can this parasite get into the guts of cats?

Well, a good way would be by first infecting things that cats like to eat–like rats.

But cats don’t like to eat dead mice. They like to eat living ones.

So, if you’re the parasite, you want to do whatever you can to make sure that your mouse gets eaten before it dies a natural death and starts decaying.

The problem is that rats don’t like to be eaten by cats. In fact, they have a panic/avoidance reaction to cats. So strong is this reaction that the scent of cat urine produces a panic reaction (which human scientists use when they need to induce fear in rats) and they flee places cats have marked with cat urine.

If you’re the parasite, that’s no good for you. The rats have an inbuilt cat-avoidance mechanism.

But maybe you can disable it.

Let’s suppose that you form cysts in the rat’s body, including in its brain. Maybe you can turn off its panic/avoidance mechanism.

If so, then your rat will stop being afraid of places that cats have marked and will spend more time in places where cats hang out, thus increasing the chances that cats will eat them.

In fact, maybe you can get the rat to become attracted to the smell of cat urine, causing him to have a suicidal attraction to cats.

If so, good for you.

Now suppose also that you–this parasite–happen to also infect HALF of the human population.

And suppose that there is evidence linking you to schizophrenia in humans.

Is there such a parasite?

There is. It’s called toxoplasma gondii.

GET THE STORY.

MORE HERE.

Incidentally, the first story mentions several other behavior-altering parasites as well. It does not, however, mention one that I’m curious to know about.

A number of years ago I saw a documentary that talked about a parasite that infects snails and causes them to get eaten by birds. This parasite does two things: It makes the snail have a compulsion to crawl up onto the tops of leaves, so birds can see them, and it makes the snail pulse in weird colors–again to attract the bird’s attention.

If anybody knows the name of that parasite, please let me know.

Not that I have any snails I want to get rid of. It’s just hate not being able to remember the name of something so eerie.

Vote! Vote! Vote!

The voting phase of the 2006 Catholic Blog Awards is now underway!

I hope that when you vote y’all will remember your humble JimmyAkin.Org (a.k.a. Defensor Fidei in the voting), which–much to my surprise–was nominated for a startling number of categories this year:

Best Apologetics Blog
Most Theological Blog
Most Informative Blog
Most Insightful Blog
Most Intellectual Blog
Most Creative Blog
Most Bizarre Blog
Most Bizarre Blog Post, and
Best Blog By A Man (I pointed out the group blog nature of JA.O, but
those in charge thought it was sufficiently identified with me that
they preferred to put it in this category)

Despite being nominated for Most Intellectual Blog, I want to stump for this award to go to someone else.

Ed Peters’ blog In the Light of the Law is devoted exclusively to high-end canon law issues. My blog also tackles high-end issues, but it also includes a lot of other stuff (e.g., humor material), meaning that its overall intellectual density per square inch of blogspace is lower, so I’m recommending votes for Ed’s blog in this category.

I’m also recommending SouthernAppeal in the categories it is running for, though The Anchoress may give it a run for its money in the political category this year.

Have fun voting!

VOTE HERE!

Why Have Babies?

The question I dealt with earlier about why one should not baptize a baby and immediately murder it to ensure its salvation brought to mind a related question that struck me back when I was a Calvinist.

The question was this: Why should one have babies at all since they will just grow up to become sinners–even saved ones–who commit more offenses against God and thus add to the evil in the universe?

The solution that I came up with at the time is that new people don’t just add new offenses to the grand ledger of the universe. They also add good to the universe. They add natural good based on what God has given them by nature, and they add supernatural good based on what God gives them by grace.

To the extent that people add good to the universe, it makes the evil they add more tolerable in a sense.

Whether they ultimately add more good than they do evil is something that only God knows, but we do know that it is his will that the human race continue until the end of the world. It’s that "Be fruitful and multiply" think, y’know?

There is another consideration here also: ultimate justice. It isn’t just that they’re adding evil to the universe and that this situation will remain unredressed, with the universe acquiring an ever more and more negative moral charge. God will ultimately balance the scales (to mix metaphors). Those who have done evil and refused to repend and accept God’s grace will ultimately get what’s coming to them. Even the saved who are forgiven their sins will still have to repent of them and deal with their consequences, either in this life or purgatory.

This also allows the evil that is done in the world to be tolerable for the sake of the good that is also done. It’s not like the evil will go on forever, unaddressed. It’s something that is only temporarily allowed so that the good in the universe can also flourish.

I’d also add one point that I would not have added as a Calvinist: God is simply not risk averse. In order to get new saved immortal beings who freely chose their salvation he is willing to risk letting them have freedom. The biggest threat to our salvation is our free will, but God is willing to let us have freedom because he’s not just after saved souls but after a certain kind of saved soul: those who have chosen him.

If he, then, is willing to take the risk that a given baby may grow up to ultimately reject him, who are we to question that?

Our job is to have the babies and point them toward God as their ultimate destination, not to decide beforehand that the risk is too great and prevent them from exercising the freedom that God wills them to have.

We can thus help children along the road to heaven by giving them spiritual goods, like the gospel and baptism (when they’re too small and trusting to reject either of these things), but we must also allow them to grow into that maturity of reason and freedom that would allow them to reject the graces they have been given if they choose to do so.

If God is willing to take that risk, we must be willing as well.

We can’t murder them right after baptism, and we can’t refrain from having babies just because we’re afraid of the risk.

We have to live our lives in accordance with God’s known goals. We must be fruitful and multiply, and we must do what we can to ensure that The Circle Will Be Unbroken, but we cannot do this in a way that seeks to eliminate human freedom and the risks that accompany it.

Freedom is essential to what God is trying to do with us.

The Gospel According To Su Doku

While browsing in the religion sections of chain bookstores, I often find pop-spirituality books with titles like The Gospel According to Peanuts or The Gospel According to Harry Potter; even, I kid you not, The Gospel According to Oprah. I’ve never even scanned through these titles, so I can’t tell you much about them, but I assume they talk about the Christian values you can expect to find in these sources. The Amazon.com ad for the Oprah book says the author, for example, "praises Oprah for using her entertainment pulpit to promote such positive spiritual values as gratitude, empathy, forgiveness and self-examination."

Uh huh.

Well, anyway, in light of these contributions to "gospel values," it occurs to me that what the world now needs is a Gospel According to Su Doku.

Perhaps you are unaware of Su Doku? Sometime last year, I started noticing books on the subject popping up in bookstores, but ignored them. Then at a Christmas party this past year, I was given a book of Su Doku puzzles and started learning. Basically, it’s a number-placement logic game popular in Japan that recently became fantastically popular in the West when the London Times began running puzzles alongside the crossword puzzles.

In Su Doku (Japanese, "single number"), there is a grid of nine blocks, with each block sectioned off into nine squares. The object is to place numbers from one to nine horizontally, vertically, and within each block without repeating a number. Never a numbers person, I didn’t think I’d like the game very much, but I was wrong. It’s a fascinating process and a lot of fun.

So, what’s my Gospel According to Su Doku? Well, it’s more an Apologetics Lessons Learned while playing Su Doku.

Work in small sections, blocking off extraneous information until it is needed. But remember that there is a bigger picture. The information you insert into the puzzle in one block must agree with the rest of the puzzle. If you put the wrong number in even one square, you’ll ruin the whole puzzle. Sweat the small stuff.
As you add more numbers to your puzzle, you will be able to solve other sections of the puzzle that you previously were unable to solve. Information in one area increases the information you have to be able to solve the rest of the puzzle.
As the numbers increasingly fall into place, you eventually reach a "tipping point" and soon the whole puzzle falls into place. Where once you could spend ten minutes trying to find a single number to fit, now you are plugging in the numbers in seconds flat.

What does this have to do with apologetics?

You should be wary of giving people more information than they request at any one time because they may not yet be ready to accept it. But keep in mind that there is a larger picture and that the information you give now is not a self-sustaining construct but a piece of a larger puzzle.
As you receive answers to questions about the faith in one area, you soon find yourself able to resolve other apologetics difficulties either you or someone else may have. For example, an answer about the proper understanding of the Incarnation here may lead to a better understanding of Mary somewhere down the line.
In the conversion process, there is eventually a "tipping point," after which you are no longer struggling to place the information you’ve received into its proper place but are merely "filling in the blanks."

Now, I just have to find time to puff these pearls of wisdom into a 80,000-word manuscript and I’ll have the next Gospel According To… book ready to market!

Baptism & Murder

A reader writes:

Dear Mr. Akin,

You recently wrote,

"If it were easier to be saved as a non-Catholic than as a Catholic then God would have perversely commanded people to enter a suboptimal situation; one would then maximize one’s chances of salvation be entering a state that is out of conformity with God’s known will, which is crazy."

This implicates a question I have been concerned about for some time: if a baptized person dies before committing any actual sins, then he is assured of salvation, correct? But this seems to lead to the disturbing and obviously wrong conclusion that, in terms of assuring their salvation, it would be optimal to murder newborn infants immediately after baptizing them.

To state this in terms of your quote above, "one would then maximize one’s child’s chances of salvation by committing an act that is out of conformity with God’s known will." Which is crazy, but also seems to be true! So why isn’t this situation analogous to the one you were talking about?

We know that God wills a number of things:

He wills our salvation.
He wills that we have reason.
He wills that we have free will.
He wills that we have good in this life as well as the next.
He wills that we have greater glory in the next life based on the good we have done in this one.
He wills that the human race continue.
He wills that his Church spread the gospel to the unevangelized for their salvation.
He wills that we not be murdered.

When trying to figure out the answer to the "Why not murder newly baptized babies?" question, one must keep the different goals in mind. It is true that God wills our salvation, but that is not the only thing that he wills. If it were his only will for us then the thing to do would be to take the most expeditious route to heaven, in which Christianity would become a kind of suicide cult. But this is not the only thing God wills for us, and Christianity is not a suicide cult.

Notice what would happen if the murder-after-infant-baptism policy were adopted:

Goal #1 would be facilitated for the babies in question.
Goal #2 would be thwarted because the children would not be allowed to grow up to exercise the reason that God made integral to their nature.
Goal #3 would be thwarted because the children would not be allowed to grow up to exercise the freedom that God made integral to their nature.
Goal #4 would be thwarted because they would have their earthly lives taken away from them.
Goal #5 would be thwarted because babies would not have the chance to grow up and do good.
Goal #6 would be thwarted because the human race would die out in one generation if this policy were enacted by everyone (though that would not be the case, because . . . ).
Goal #7 would be thwarted because the Church would go extinct before it could carry out its mission of evangelization.
Goal #8 would be thwarted for obvious reasons.

Also, the few remaining adult Christians would end up locked away in prison or put to death themselves, because no successful society can tolerate mass murder and suicide cults in its midst. There are laws against these things for a reason, and that reason points us in the direction of why God doesn’t want us to commit these abominations.

The fact that God has more than one goal that he wishes to achieve with us means that he allows them to exist in tension with each other. He doesn’t just will our salvation. He wills our salvation AND these other things.

The biggest tension among the goals is that between #1 and #3, and that’s where the biggest mystery lies. God could just fix all our wills on good and put us in heaven, but he apparently wants the saved to freely choose their fate rather than having it thrust upon them.

That’s true of us adults, and it’s true of infants.

This is accomplished, in the case of infant baptism, by allowing the child to grow up and exercise the free will that God made integral to their nature.

He’s willing to allow baptism to infants to provide for their spiritual development as Christians on their way to the mature use of reason and free will, and he’s willing to allow it as a guarantor of their salvation in the case that they don’t make it to the age of reason, but he is pursuing more than one goal with respect to babies, and all his goals for them must be kept in mind.

Starting a Church to lower people’s chances of salvation, though? That’s just plain crazy. (And contrary to goal #7.)