Many people point to Scandinavia as an example of a successful, moral atheism.

Anyone who has paid attention knows that Denmark and Sweden are among the least religious nations in the world. Polls asking about belief in God, the importance of religion in people’s lives, belief in life after death or church attendance consistently bear this out.

It is also well known that in various rankings of nations by life expectancy, child welfare, literacy, schooling, economic equality, standard of living and competitiveness, Denmark and Sweden stand in the first tier.

I actually think that it’s a better example of ceremonial deism;

The many nonbelievers he interviewed, both informally and in structured, taped and transcribed sessions, were anything but antireligious, for example. They typically balked at the label “atheist.” An overwhelming majority had in fact been baptized, and many had been confirmed or married in church.

That sounds a lot like the Church of England of my youth.

The interviewees affirmed a Christianity that seems to have everything to do with “holidays, songs, stories and food” but little to do with God or Creed, everything to do with rituals marking important passages in life but little to do with the religious meaning of those rituals.

Amen to that.

In which David Frum points out that a large contingent under the republican big tent believes in a dangerous myth.

The myth is the myth of the Goldwater triumph of 1964. It goes approximately as follows:

In 1964, after years of watered down politics, Republicans turned to a true conservative, Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater. Yes, Goldwater lost badly. But in losing, he bequeathed conservatives a national organization – and a new champion, Ronald Reagan. Goldwater’s defeat opened the way to Reagan’s ultimate triumph and the conservative ascendancy of the 1980s and 1990s.

This (the myth continues) is the history we need to repeat. If we can just find the right messenger in 2012, the message that worked for Reagan will work again. And even if we cannot find the right messenger, losing on principle in 2012 will open the way to a more glorious victory in 2016.

About ten years ago, I was very taken withThe Straight Dope, and every now and then - and against my better judgment - I go back and read it for old times’ sake.

The same things about the style of debate there that used to enchant me still enchant me - where else can you read well-argued positions both for and and against Objectivism, Free Will, Thomas Aquinas and why we should cut off the baby boomers?- and the things that frustrated me still frustrate the hell out of me.

My frustration this time revolves around how many atheists say that no amount of evidence would persuade them of the existence of God. Me? I’d be persuaded by even the slightest evidence.

On the enchanting side of the ledger, this thread about 25 reasons to not believe in God brings out the best in some Christian apologists.

Cecil himself is, of course, the master:

Also, do animals ever do it for fun?

— Concerned reader, Los Angeles

As for your second question, we must point out that, scientifically speaking, animals always do it for fun. The only critters who do it because they have to are Catholics. Take it from your Unca Cecil.

— Cecil Adams

Y’all have been following the there is probably no god campaign on buses in London?

You can make your own now.

Roger Ebert has written a powerful, meandering essay about shame.

The essay takes many twists and turns and each one of them is fascinating journey in its own right.

It starts out as a review of the movie The Reader

I was watching Tony Scott on the Charlie Rose program, and he said, in connection with “The Reader,” that he was getting tired of so many movies about the Holocaust. I didn’t agree or disagree. What I thought was, “The Reader” isn’t about the Holocaust. It’s about not speaking when you know you should.

[It's great that The Reader is not about the holocaust because I'd like to see it and my wife wouldn't watch it with me if it were about the holocaust.]

In his first meander, Ebert uses Twain

That wise man Mark Twain told us: “In religion and politics people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from others.”

as an excuse to reel off a laundry list of Things He Believes

This is true. It is even sometimes true of me. Perhaps of you. However, there are certain areas in which I consider myself an authority, like the movies. I have devoted years to learning about the Theory of Evolution. I think Creationism is superstitious poppycock. I believe the problem with the literal interpretation of the Bible is that anyone can easily discover its support for the opinions they already hold. I believe Conservatism has proven itself disastrous every time it has been implemented in this country.

After meandering past speaking engagements, dinner parties, segregation and atheism - with every meander a gem - he ends up back at The Reader.

The Reader, Ebert says, [Spoiler Alert!] is about a woman’s wrongful conviction that she could have easily avoided if only she could overcome her shame about her inability to read. A key witness realizes this but fails to speak up because of his own shame that he had an affair with her.

This is where his essay gets interesting because it leads Ebert into a riff on the power of shame

We learn of young mothers who put their babies in dumpsters because they are ashamed of their pregnancy. Young fathers who murder their girlfriends, simply because of the universal human reality of pregnancy. We hear of prison guards who follow orders to torture, orders they know are illegal and immoral. And leaders who issue the orders. We learn of terrorists who die and kill others rather than face the shame of being frightened to. We hear of gang members who kill people unknown to them, not because they want to, but because they have been shamed into “proving” themselves as men. We hear of Wall Street executives who lead their firms into what they know are dangerous and unsound practices, because they would be shamed to be outdone by rival executives. They steal the savings from millions of victims, so they can win a pissing contest.

and ultimately triggers Ebert’s memory of a shameful episode in his own past. Ebert’s shame story is about cheating in a game of chess with a blind man who was his very good friend.

More than 40 years have passed since that game, but I have not forgotten it. I can never even think of the University of Cape Town without it coming to mind. My cheating itself was shameful. When I denied it, that was despicable. Herb, I hope someone reads this and tells you about it. You were right. Of course, you always knew you were right, and we both knew that I had lied.

Just reading that makes me feel that familiar burning sensation that heralds the unbidden return of my least favourite memory. Suddenly I am transported back to my fourth year Latin exam in Room 41 and

David Samuel is handing me his exercise book under the desk.

We are halfway through our end of year exams.

Our exams are kind of a big deal because, unlike America in 2009, in England circa 1981 the only thing we will have to show for all our years of schooling is a certificate that said how we performed in a bunch of exams that we’ll take at the end of the fifth year [maps to 10th grade - ed].

We do one of these six hour exams - an ‘O’ Level - for each subject we take (plus an oral for languages). I’m taking 9: English, English, Maths, Maths, Chemistry, Physics, Biology, French and Latin.

Every year until now has ended with a solid battery of  two weeks of exams with 8 hours a day under exam conditions. Our grades throughout the year are based on classwork and homework but all that was tossed aside after the exams. Only the exam counts. The fourth year exams are special because they are a dress rehearsal for the real thing at the end of the fifth year.

For me, exams are a godsend. The laziest student ever (at least until I have children of my own), I have made avoiding work into an art-form. In the last two years of chemistry, I have written a total of three and a half pages of notes and have done no homework at all. I read computer magazines in Latin class and I am teaching myself BASIC in French. I am bottom of my class. In two weeks I will be top. Again. They stopped giving me ‘most improved student awards’ after four years of improving from worst to best every exam time.

Best of all, I genuinely enjoy exam time. We have no homework assigned and I have no need to study. The fact that I have no notes to study from is irrelevant. I will not open a book. Last Christmas, Miss Mills said that we should be studying about 6 hours a day by now. I have studied for less than 6 hours total in my whole life and Not At All for these exams.

Each subject has an essay-based exam and a quiz-based (occasionally multi-choice) exam. In Latin, it’s translations.

In class, we have translated Caesar’s Gallic Wars, Tacitus’ Histories, umpteen poems by each of Ovid, Horace and Catullus and the complete works of Pliny the Younger. In the exam, we’ll have to translate some 10 or 12 of these.

And now I’m sitting in the back row of room 41, next to David Samuel and, when I open the exam paper, I realize that I don’t know anything.

It’s easy to fake your way through translating French. It’s all “Ou est la place de la Concorde” but Latin is much more precise, more distant. More foreign… And you certainly can’t fake your way through poetry. They expect us to understand it.

David Samuel leans over, opens his bag and shows me that he has a book with all the translations. “Give it to me”, I signal. He smiles and hands it over. I copy just enough to save me from being booted out of Latin class because Mr Hickey doesn’t want bad students sullying his record.

That feeling of dread when I opened the exam paper inspired me to study for an exam for the first time in my life.

I still didn’t study for Maths or any of the sciences (all As, in case you are wondering) because they were easy. Nor did I study for English Lit as I had never got better than 8% and studying wasn’t going to make much difference. [I didn't even read one of the assigned books - Brighton Rock - until I was 23. When I did finally read it, I fell in love with Graham Greene and have now read all of his books. If I had read it at 15 like I was supposed to, I might've gotten a better grade at 'O' Level but I might've hated Greene and never read him again.]

But I did study Latin.

I memorized the translations of every single one of those histories, poems, legal documents and letters to the Emperor Trajan [except Pliny X.96 - the one about the Christians, but that's a story for a different day].

I still remember many of them now

That Suffenus, whom we know well Varus,
Is a charming, witty and sophisticated man.
Yet at the same time he writes more verse that anyone else.

Not, as usually happens, on second class papyrus.
He uses new papyrus, all ruled with lead and smoothed with pumice…

But, more than the poems, I remember the shame because it eats into my conception of who I am. I have barely spoken with David Samuel since that day but I don’t think I could even look him in the eye if I saw him again.

Worse still, he was the boyfriend (and may have married?) of my girlfriend’s best friend. I imagine him telling Sarah who tells Jo, remember Kevin? The kid who was good at exams? He was a cheat. I saw him. He used to take books into all the exams.

David Samuel’s mum used to work with my mum. They were very competitive about their offspring as mothers often are. What if David’s mum knows I am a cheat?

I never cheated again but that once was enough to give me a lifetime of shame.

The common element of all these shame stories leads me to propose the following thesis:

Our greatest shame arises when we do something that is not just bad but that conflicts with our image of ourselves.

Ebert’s is bleaker:

I believe the movie may be demonstrating a fact of human nature: Most people, most of the time, all over the world, choose to go along. We vote with the tribe. What would we have done during the rise of Hitler? If we had been Jews, we would have fled or been killed. But what if we were one of the rest of the Germans?

It’s a shame that the move is about the holocaust because I’d really like to go see it but my normal movie going companion won’t take me so it will be condemmed to my Netflix queue where it will fester until it finally arrives and sits on the shelf for three weeks because I can only watch those movies after everyone else has gone to bed which seems to get later and later as the years go by.

It’s a shame, I tell you.

The political blogs for the last few weeks have been talking about something called Liberaltarianism. It’s based around the idea that libertarians have more in common with a certain kind of liberal than they do with mainstream conservatives - or at least the main demographic of the Republican Party.

With a handful of exceptions (you know who you are!), most of my friends test in the bottom left quadrant of the Political Compass. Some of them even describe themselves as left-libertarian.

I blogged about this a while back, suggesting Go Down! as a strategy for the dems to distinguish them from the ever-moving-up pubbies circa 2006. But now, as the conservative coalition debates who is in and who is out, many people below the line, left and right, are self-identifying as liberaltarians.

So what do liberaltarians believe?

Stealing liberally from Humanitology,

I believe in having the smallest government possible while still providing social services to those in need. I want very few laws governing my behavior and very many services helping me to help myself should I need them. I do want some check on trade and big business, but I also want individuals to be as free as possible…

…I do not mind taxes, but I want the majority of my money and government power in the hands of my state. I feel very strongly about local government and states’ rights.

and, in summary

Few laws governing behavior.
Many services helping the poor to no longer need services.
Small federal.
Medium state.
Fiscal conservative.
Social liberal.
Liberaltarian.

Will Wilkinson thinks that the unholy alliance of social conservatives and libertarians is a vestige of their shared fear of communism:

Meanwhile, with the obsolescence of the anti-communist alliance with conservatives, many libertarians have sloughed off much of their previously tactically useful sympathy for socially conservative initiatives. Freed to be full-on social liberals, many libertarians are left sensing a much deeper cultural affinity for the left than the right

In another post, Will explains why libertarians (and he includes himself as such) might be more at home on the left and paints a nice picture for why this would an attractive proposition:

So I think my best bet is just to go ahead and try to come up with a more coherent and effective version of practical market-friendly liberalism. I’d like to think that would be attractive to the tens of millions of Americans who think conservatives are vile, that conventional liberals are too deep in the pocket of the Democratic Party to actually promote prosperity and opportunity, and that libertarians are dogmatic, weird, and irrelevant.

If only the system of democracy in America weren’t so firmly intertwined with the Democrats and the Republicans, the Liberaltarians might be a new party in the making.

Kalid at Better Explained likes to find intuitive ways to explain difficult mathematical concepts like,

Why does 00 = 1 ?

I like Kalid.

Steve Freemand observes (We are not craftspeople yet) the poor opinion that the general public has of software development as a profession.

Recently the (London) Times put the dire state of UK government IT projects on their front page.

One bright correspondent suggested:

Why not use university computer science departments for large public sector IT projects? They could form part of the course work and would be far cheaper as there would be no culture of profit to worry about.I can just hear the other disciplines jumping on this bandwagon: “it was costing too much to do the stress calculations for our nuclear power station, so we assigned them as coursework”, “we can’t afford these QC’s, so we got some students to handle the negligence case”

Implicit in the criticism is the idea that software development is so easy that we don’t need professionals - we could just have students do all the work.

It’s a fun game to play.

We could have

• med students doing all the surgery
• trainee pilots flying all the 747s
• law students help the high court catch up with their backlog - maybe they could write the legislation too
• Driver’s ed students can drive all the buses and trains

“Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

I can’t praise Blogging the Origin highly enough. For anyone who didn’t follow along in real time, Seed Magazine has prepared this handy-dandy summary:

Should The Origin be filed away as just another yellow-paged Victorian artifact, or do Darwin’s ideas still stand up in light of what genetics, ecology, and paleontology have taught us about evolution? Whitfield spent the past month teasing out this question. The result is an edifying and often amusing analysis of one of the most influential scientific works of our time. Read along.

Coming Out
“Let’s use part of our brains to try and ignore all that we now know about Darwin’s biography and legacy, pretend that this is our first encounter with his theory, and that evolution must stand or fall on the quality of the science and writing in The Origin.”

Introduction
“[T]he route into his theory begins, not with something obviously ‘extreme,’ like an elephant or a giant squid, but a bird that you would be pretty much guaranteed to see on a stroll in the woods around Down House.”

Chapter 1: Variation Under Domestication
“If it was down to you to invent biology, where would you begin? Darwin takes the time-honoured path of sacrificing realism for tractability, and studies a simplified and controlled version of nature: farming. He recognized that animal breeders were the biotechnologists of his day, and possessed the nearest thing to a body of experimental biological knowledge.”

Chapter 2: Variation Under Nature
“I felt like I’d gone from 1859 to 1959 in the turn of a page. Besides staking out the ground for population genetics, Darwin, in half-a-dozen dense pages at the end of the chapter, outlines many of the patterns in the diversity, abundance, and distribution of living things that ecologists are still trying to understand.”

Chapter 3: Struggle for Existence
“If I were running an undergraduate ecology course (which, for everyone’s sake, we can be glad that I am not), I would make this chapter the first thing on the reading list. It’s a capsule textbook, and about twenty-eight times more exciting than any of the required reading I encountered as a student.”

Chapter 4: Natural Selection
“Mathematicians and physicists speak of a result ‘falling out of the equations,’ implying that if you set things up properly, the rest takes care of itself. Chapter 4 of The Origin, ‘Natural Selection,’ is where evolution falls out of the machinery that Darwin has spent the three previous chapters assembling.”

Chapter 5: Laws of Variation
“To a man with a hammer, said Mark Twain, everything looks like a nail. The better your hammer, I would add, the more nail-like everything looks. In natural selection, Darwin had crafted one of the best hammers of all time. And in chapter 5 of The Origin, ‘Laws of Variation’,,’ you can hear him umming and aahing about various alternative mechanisms of evolutionary change before deciding that, actually, you know what this needs…hold ‘er steady…Thwack!”

Chapter 6: Difficulties with Theory
“Up until now, our route into the theory of evolution by natural selection has been all downhill. One thing has led effortlessly to another, with Darwin giving the occasional nudge to steer things in the right direction. Not any more.”

Chapter 7: Instinct
“If, like Darwin, you didn’t know about genetics, and thought that inheritance was a process of blending, it’s difficult to see how you could have made any more progress along this line of thought than he does here.”

Chapter 8: Hybridism
“What I think Darwin is doing in this chapter — and in other parts of the book where he seems to get bogged down in data, such as the second half of chapter 5 — is testing the limits of generalization in his science.”

Chapter 9: On the Imperfection of the Geological Record
“‘Paradigm’ is an overused word, but it’s a measure of the paradigm-shifting nature of The Origin that in much of it, such as in chapter 9 ‘On the imperfection of the geological record’, Darwin flies blind.”

Chapter 10: On the Geological Succession of Organic Beings
“Whether palaeontology gives Darwin quite as much support as he thought is an open question. The fact that many organisms remain recognizable across massive stretches of geological time suggests that stabilizing, or purifying, selection is also an important force, selecting against the extremes.”

Chapter 11: Geographical Distribution
“In the way it brings together Darwin the explorer and observer, Darwin the experimenter and Darwin the theorist, this chapter contains some of the most thoroughly convincing parts of the entire book.”

Chapter 12: Geographical Distribution, continued
“It’s been said that all European philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato. Well, all ecology is a series of footnotes to Darwin.”

Chapter 13: Mutual Affinities of Organic Beings: Morphology: Embryology: Rudimentary Organs
“In [chapter 13], Darwin tackles the science of classification — perhaps more than in any other part of the book, I sensed that he was addressing his fellow pros (or gentlemen amateurs).”

Chapter 14: Recapitulation and Conclusion
“This relentless piling, sorting and re-arranging of evidence can make Darwin seem a little OCD, like an intellectual version of Wall-E. But he also knows that beneath all the case studies, there’s a logical core to evolution by natural selection, even if he can’t put it in an equation.”

Epilogue
“Biology doesn’t erase its past. It just forgets to cite it. The Origin is biology’s hub — all the routes that the science has taken since seem to pass through it.”

The last words belong to Darwin.

“When the views entertained in this volume on the origin of species, or when analogous views are generally admitted, we can dimly foresee that there will be a considerable revolution in natural history.”

The Sombrero Galaxy - 28 million light years from Earth - has 800 billion suns and is 50,000 light years across.

and it’s very pretty.