Jesus Kebab
For each kebab, you will need:
- Two bamboo skewers
- One large mushroom
- Three or four sliced sweet onion rings
- Cubed tomato, onion, and green pepper to taste
- A large chunk of fried tofu
- Two or three ears of baby corn
- A longitudinal quarter of a red bell pepper
Marinate all your ingredients in olive oil dosed with lemon juice, with black pepper and finely-chopped basil, mint, and rosemary. Two hours should be sufficient.
Assemble your Jesus Kebab from the top down. Impale your onion halo on the first skewer, and slide it about 3/4 of the way to the bottom. The halo will look holier if you stab it on almost radially. Next the mushroom; as this will be Jesus's head, you may wish to draw a face on it using peppercorns or cloves. Next perhaps a smallish cube of tomato to serve as a neck, and then the broad and manly tofu torso. (The tofu will absorb the marinade in a manner which quite beggars belief.) The flesh of an unlucky beast may perhaps be substituted for the tofu if one is so inclined.
Below that, I like to make a crude pelvic girdle from a piece of green pepper, cut from towards the bottom of the bell. Then a groinal region to taste. There are no wrong answers. Be creative. Be artistic.
Finally, form the legs from your quarter of a red pepper by cutting out a triangular gap starting slightly below the curvy bit at the top and terminating at a width of perhaps a centimeter at most at the bottom. If your pepper was curvy enough at the bottom, your Jesus may even have feet.
Next drive the other skewer through the tofu torso transversally. Attach one ear of baby corn on either side. Your Jesus is now complete.
Grill it on the barbeque over a moderate head for perhaps 15 minutes or until sufficiently charred.
They were pronounced sacrelicious.
At Beliefnet: atheist and neuroscientist-in-training Sam Harris takes on Andrew Sullivan in a fight to the bloody death over that whole God business. It saddens me that Sullivan is still able to find work. The man's always been a sloppy, shallow, dishonest thinker, from his pimping of racist pseudoscience as editor of The New Republic to his frothing hysteria over the War on Terra to his bitchy and stylistically limp blogging. It seems nothing has changed, as in this exchange he routinely mischaracterises Harris's points, refuses to engage with the substance of Harris's arguments, and demonstrates that he knows nothing about the practice of history or mathematics while trying to use them to bolster his case.
As a mathematician, I take this personally.
The practice of mathematics can essentially be reduced to the following archetypical question: "Assuming that X, Y, and Z are true, what can we logically deduce?" There's another side to it too, though, which most people probably aren't familiar with: "If X, Y, and Z are true, we can prove some lovely things. But are X, Y, and Z in fact true for anything interesting?" Mathematics is not at its heart just a lot of empty sophistry in which Mr Cleverdick can come waltzing in and make any old assumptions he wants. That's not sporting. Mathematicians demand consistency. Mathematicians demand rigorous, detailed, very explicit chains of logical reasoning. Mathematicians, oftentimes, demand constructability: if you intend to prove a beautiful and elegant result about all things with properties X, Y, and Z, you'd better show people how to get their hands on things that really do have properties X, Y, and Z as well. Mathematics is not divorced from empiricism. Huge numbers of the most significant and brilliant insights in math have come about by seeking ways to mathematically model physical systems, and really interesting mathematical results very often give us deeper insights into phenomena in the physical world. Mathematics is the image of science in Alice's mirror.
The key, fundamental, vital spark shared by all forms of rational investigation--science, history, mathematics, anything worth taking seriously--is this: you have to back your shit up, man. You have to document your assumptions and the chain of reasoning that led you from them to your conclusion. You have to make a convincing case for the reasonableness of your assumptions and open them up to criticism and further investigation. You do not pull things out of your ass. History may not involve control groups or experimentation, but it is still a rational discipline: it hinges on extrapolation, by chains of logic which are open to inspection and criticism, from a pool of data open to all comers. Likewise mathematics, building logically off of propositions which are known, explicit, and transparent.
Religious faith, you will observe, does not share this spark at all. Religious experiences are not transparent, cannot be shared, are not open to inspection and criticism. They are not like historical data. They are not like scientific data. They are nothing at all like mathematical axioms. All religious propositions have at their core this statement: "I know these things to be true, although you'll just have to take a bunch of dead people's words for it."
So when Sullivan says...
My point here is to say that once you have conceded the possibility of a truth that is not reducible to empirical proof [as in history and mathematics], you have allowed for the validity of religious faith as a form of legitimate truth-seeking in a different mode.
...he exposes himself as an ignorant fraud.
Quelle surprise.