religion for fun and prophet, as I called it in a sophomore-year writing project

We have just had an example of prophetic rhetoric gone awry in a land raised on Old Testament (for such the books of the Hebrew Prophets would be called hereabouts) calls to judgment that comport ill with the contrary sense of Americans as a Chosen People who are not under the Law but under Grace. (Never mind that that notion makes no sense whatsoever if you look at it closely..."other branches were lopped off so that I might be grafted in," and Americans of a certain ilk have always been certain that God looks on them and their land more favorably than on anyone else.) And folks who are under Grace do not like to have it suggested rudely that they might be running roughshod over the Law and be subject to judgment.

By contrast, it occurs to me that not only Gnostic religions like the one practiced by Iraq's Mandaeans but religions declaring that material reality is ultimately an illusion provide immense incentives for political protest. Since most folks would feel that they are foredoomed by their own blindness to suffer through at least another umpteen million delusional incarnations, they might as well make things materially better for their own selves the next time round, and the time after that, and the time after that. By any means necessary. If their activism pays off for them in the present life also, that's even better.

Let the monks get out this time round if they want to, such folks must think. Everybody else in such a religion plays the odds for five to five hundred years down the line.

Which reminds me, incidentally, of the late Arthur C. Clarke's "The Nine Billion Names of God," in which, as you know, computer technology helps the monks bring about the extinction of the illusory universe.

I would like to discuss Clarke's odd brand of cosmic optimism regarding our evolutionary destiny, which makes Teilhard de Chardin seem like a pessimist by comparison. But that would be a topic for another post and I suspect that about fifty thousand other bloggers will have had plenty to say about that.

questioning that ol' dominant paradigm by any means necessary

Homi Bhabha is a Parsee. Who knew?

Happy New Year, y'all. A day early, though I see from news photos that they're jumping over bonfires out there in certain parts of the planet.

Bhabha, seemingly unaware of the nature of popularizations, is quoted on Wikipedia as having said, in a 2005 interview in The Hindu that is still available online, "[I]t annoys me that people talk about easy access to a work and a notion of transparency without thinking of what is really involved. For instance, the science section of the New York Times is not immediately comprehensible. Do I therefore say that I am not interested in the whole article? The idea that sources from the humanities have no philosophical language of their own, that they must be continually speaking in the common language of the common person while the scientists can publish in a language that needs more time to get into, is problematic to me."

Well, actually, Homi, the scientists don't speak that language, the paraphrasing popularizers do. utopyr has made me aware of a review in the current issue of Science of a book about popularizers and their literary strategies: The book is Elizabeth Leane's Reading Popular Physics. The review, "Fresh Renderings of Physics" by David Kaiser, will have to be gotten by hook, crook, per-article payment, or existing subscription.