Why Evolution is True

Posted on June 28, 2009 by smellincoffee

Why Evolution is True

© 2009 Jerry A. Coyne
282 pages
Evolution is actually one of my favorite science topics to read about. Back in high school, I was a young-earth creationist who wore Kent Hovind tapes out while shaking my head in self-righteous disbelief at the incompetent-when-not-evil Evolutionists. Obviously, things change. My defense of creationism was a defense of my then-identity as a fundamentalist Pentecostal, and when that identity vanished so did my fixed determination to defend Genesis. Once I began to accept the facts of evolution, I found a renewed joy in science: evolution seems to knit the world together(“…beyond any untying”*), and it informs my approach to any field of study that involves humanity. It is an immensely enjoyable theory. This year may be called the “Year of Evolution” owing to it being the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species. Given that, I have read and will most likely read more in the field of evolution this year. (I’ve read Evolution for Everyone and The Reluctant Mr. Darwin so far).
What this is is a very straightforward accounting of why the theory of evolution is regarded as and used as fact by virtually every biologist save Liberty University’s gardening staff. Coyne begins by explaining the six principles (which Coyne untactfully calls tenets: the word has an unfortunate religious or ideological connotation) of evolution, and then makes predictions based on those principles for what we should see in the natural world. The chapters that follow show that we do see these things: separate chapters cover the fossil record, the geographical distribution of life, and the existence of vestigial organs and what would otherwise be bad design. After setting out the evidence, he then spends a few chapters detailing how exactly evolution works, including a look at speciation. The last chapter of the book proper is an examination of human evolution. The book is finally completed with Coyne addressing the question of why evolution is so controversial. He comments that no one lies awake at night pondering the arguments for and against evolution: they like awake at night worrying about social problems. The reason people resist evolution, he says, is because they have some emotional attachment to it not being true. Acceptance of evolution will come not when the fossils and DNA have convinced people, but when they no longer fear it being true. He ends the book on the note of trying to address people’s fears about morality and the value of human life and so forth.
This is a very tidy book: Coyne makes his case simply and does not bore the reader with page after page of arguments and examples. I think the ideal reader for this book is someone who doesn’t know what the arguments for evolution. If you are looking for a book to serve as reliable ammunition against creationist, I would suggest looking at Eugenie Scott’s Evolution vs. Creationism. Coyne’s book, however readable and well-done, doesn’t have the page after page of examples, arguments, and counter-arguments that thicker books have. The only attack he does make on creationism is the rather oblique look at examples of what would be “bad design” if it were deliberate design This is a definite recommendation to anyone who wants a refresher or introduction to evolution.
Related Reading:
* The quote is from the Star Trek episode “Who Mourns for Adonais”, in which Captain Kirk convinces one of his crew to leave the Greek god Apollo and return to the ship. Full quotation:

Give me your hand … your hand! Now feel that: Human flesh against human flesh. We’re the same. We share the same history, the same heritage, the same lives. We’re tied together beyond any untying. Man or woman, it makes no difference, we’re human. We couldn’t escape from each other even if we wanted to. That’s how you do it, Lieutenant. By remembering who and what you are: a bit of flesh and blood afloat in a universe without end. And the only thing that’s truly yours is the rest of humanity. That’s where our duty lies. Do you understand me?

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Socrates Café

Posted on June 28, 2009 by smellincoffee

Socrates Café: A Fresh Taste of Philosophy

© Christopher Phillips, 2001
241 pages
Although I have never taken a single philosophy class, I consider myself a student of philosophy. I discovered it in the autumn of 2006 after a friend asked me to listen to a Christian apologist named Ravi Zacharias. Listening to Zacharias, I found myself in the novel position of really thinking about life in a serious way. In an attempt to deal with his arguments, I would often write about the topic at hand. The result of this process was that I found myself thinking about everything, turning that principle of freethought (of which I approved) into practice for myself. Philosophy became all the more interesting when I realized through the works of Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus that it could be put into practice — could be lived. One YouTube account, “PhilosophicalMedia“, contains a few episodes of a show in which the host tries to look at philosophers whose work involved a different way of thinking about life, or a different way of living. The videos have such titles as “Seneca on Anger” and “Epicurus on Happiness”. One of the videos is on Socrates, and at one point in the video the host puts the Socratic method into practice by going out into the streets and badgering people with questions.
I like to see people grapple with philosophical questions: it seems to me that we are at our most human when we are engaged in philosophical inquiry. When I spotted this book in the library catalogue and skimmed through its description, I immediately became excited because it seemed as if this book would take philosophy to the streets. As it turns out, that is not quite the case — but I was so interested in what the book actually was that I didn’t realize that book wasn’t what I had expected until hours after I finished it. Christopher Philips does take philosophy to people — he just does it in a more civilized way than Socrates himself. The book is his account of hosting hundreds of “Socrates Cafés” in which people voluntarily gather to ask questions — and discuss those questions. At first, these meeting sessions are held in actual cafes, but the author will host them in prisons, nursing homes, libraries, and schoolrooms. Each session starts out with Phillips asking people to submit a question: once someone comes forward, people begin discussing that question and asking questions about the question until hours have passed and people have immersed themselves in philosophical inquiry. The people who come are not just curious or philosophically-minded adults: some are children, and at one point Philips hosts a meeting that consists only of children and senior citizens. Through the course of the book, Phillips and his congregants discuss love, friendship, age, emotions, and all manner of things until the book ends with two questions on metaphysics.
What surprised Phillips was how meaningful philosophy and the cafes became to people. Although it is clear that Phillips has hosted hundreds of these events all around the country, he apparantly invested a lot of time in one or two of the groups, developing deep friendships and even falling in love with and marrying one of his fellow “Socratics”. From what Phillips has written, the discussion groups create a lot of intellectual and emotional intimacy between people, and they regard the weekly sessions as vital, finding in them religious communion even though religion is never discussed. What Phillips aims to do with these clubs and with this book is to foster a sense of philosophy in more people, seeing the decline of intellectual life — intellectual life being actively thinking about things, rather than just knowing facts — as detrimental to people’s mental health and to society in general. The records of the cafes are tied together with thoughts by Phillips, who attempts to connect what he and his fellow Socratics are discussing with what other philosophers have discussed. Sometimes “cafe sessions” are linked with such an essay.
The book was a treat to read, although some of the discussions toward the end were too metaphysical in nature for me to follow enthusiastically. I confess that I may have enjoyed the book more for its concept than for the writing itself: the linking essays were sometimes unfruitful reading, and Phillips sometimes repeats himself. What I like most about this book is that it shows people grappling with questions, rather than giving up and accepting trite responses.
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The Age of American Unreason

Posted on June 25, 2009 by smellincoffee
The Age of American Unreason
© 2008 Susan Jacoby
356 pages
Oddly enough, I first heard of this book about a year ago when author Susan Jacoby was invited on Point of Inquiry to talk about it. I remember being intrigued at the time, although I didn’t imagine I would be able to access it anytime soon: my local libraries are not replete with books on skepticism or related issues. I was pleasantly surprised, therefore, to accidentally stumble upon The Age of American Unreason in my local library’s web catalogue a month or so back. (I’ve been forgetting to check it out for a while, obviously.) The book is a general history of anti-intellectual movements as well as movements that profit from ignorance in the United States and an examination of those movements’ causes — including repeated looks at post-Nixon American culture. When I think of anti-intellectual movements, I think of Creationists versus Biologists — but Jacoby’s range is far broader than that. In the book’s three hundred pages, Jacoby will look at America’s treatment of intellectualism in its opening decades, criticize Social Darwinism, Communism, middlebrow culture, narratives of the 1960s, celebrity cults, fundamentalism, ideology both old and new, and contemporary American culture (“the culture of distraction”). What emerges is an explanation for why the United States has the anti-intellectual culture that it has now, drawing on the history of intellectual and anti-intellectual movements in the United States and an analysis of their consequences.
There’s a lot going on this book, but I never found Jacoby’s presentation of her material to be either limited, confusing, or overwhelming. She’s a professional author who knows how to present her case. It reminds me a lot of Neil Postman, especially as television and the Internet enter her narrative. She is a cultural conservative in the style of Postman as she defends the intellectual potency of print culture against the kind of culture that constant television and Internet access generate. Media-driven culture is in her opinion one of the major contributors to a general culture of ignorance — along with, of course, religious fundamentalism. I think Jacoby argues fairly well: she looks to try to emulate intellectuals from ages past in giving opposing opinions a voice in her narrative. As I read any book, I engage it and attempt to play the devil’s advocate. There were some stretches here, but overall I think she builds her case well — there ought to be enough in here to give everyone something to think about. Those who are not Americans need not be excluded: the US appears to be contagious. It’s an informative and easy-to-follow read and a definite recommendation.

“Is it possible that American voters have learned something about the consequences of choosing an intellectually challenged chief executive on the basis of a beer test? […] The most active candidates for the presidential nomination in both parties over the past year cannot be accused of being dumb. […] Each of them pronounces the word “nuclear” correctly. It is a safe bet that all of them read newspapers and that none of them waits for a staff briefing each day in order to avoid being exposed to “opinions” from the outside world. It remains to be seen, as the campaign heats up and comes down to the final two, whether “elitism” will resurface as a political negative. One wonders whether any candidate, instead of trying to prove that he or she is just one of the folks, would dare to tell voters that what the nation needs not an ordinary but an extra ordinary president as president and that one crucial qualification for the nation’s highest office is the intellectual ability to distinguish, in times of crisis and on a daily basis,. between worthwhile and worthless opinions.”

– page 287. Emphasis added by me.

Related Reading:
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This Week at the Library (24/6)

Posted on June 24, 2009 by smellincoffee

Books this Update:

  • Jesus, Deepak Chopra
  • Bagombo Snuff Box, Kurt Vonnegut
  • Blue Like Jazz, Donald Miller
  • Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays, Stephen Hawking
  • Medical Firsts, Robert Adler
I started the week off on a fictional note with Deepak Chopra’s Jesus. I read a book about Jesus by Chopra last week and didn’t like it much, so I suppose it’s a little strange that I checked out another. What made me do it, though, was that this was a novel — and I thought it would tell the story of the Christian gospels from Jesus’ point of view. It isn’t quite what I expected. Chopra decides to focus on Jesus’ journey to enlightenment during his twenties. Because there is no evidence documenting what his life was like during that time, Chopra instead uses what he refers to as a template of enlightenment — a path that all who have realized “god-consciousness” have followed. Unfortunately, the novel never really grows from that point: it doesn’t read like a real human story, it reads like some kind of spiritual Mad-Libs. Although this is set in a historical setting, that setting has no influence on the story: this book could have been written in modern-day Croatia. The characterization of Jesus seems forced after a while. I think people who find Jesus interesting and who are not attached to a particular interpretation of his life will probably find something to enjoy here, but without that I think the novel would fail to hold people’s interest.
Whenever I have a book of essays or short stories, I don’t read them all in one go but choose to enjoy them throughout the week instead, so the order that I comment on them may be slightly out of order from the order in which they were read. Throughout the week I read from Kurt Vonnegut’s Bagombo Snuff Box, a collection of his earliest (pre-1953) work. There are over a dozen short stories here, all terribly interesting and most making sly criticisms of the culture. The settings vary: some are set during the Depression and some are set during the space age, but most of them are confined to the late forties and very early fifties. The book ends with a commentary by Vonnegut on his time as a contributor to short-story magazines. The book is a must-read for Vonnegut fans, and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to people who enjoy reading in general.
Blue Like Jazz was probably the most interesting book this week, being the story of one man’s life and his relationship with Christianity in various forms. The book is not organized beyond topical chapters: it seems to have been written free-form, and Miller goes from thought to thought in a way that’s lively, but not distracting. Although his writing style is somewhat whimsical, he does talk about serious issues of life and I think he does so seriously. My thoughts about the book changed from sentence to sentence, from paragraph to paragraph — Miller can be frustrating, mystical, uplifting, and funny all at the same time, and I find it hard to really get my head around the book. I can’t say who I’d recommend it to: it was overall a fun and sometimes thoughtful read, but it’s unpredictable and so is the way people are liable to respond to it.
Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays by Stephen Hawking is much more straightforward. The book is a collection of essays, some on personal topics and some on scientific topics — beginning with the one and working its way forward to the other. I find it hard to be thrilled about black holes and quantum theory –which the science essays are generally about, but Hawkings isn’t dull. The book ends with a transcript of Hawkings “Desert Island Discs” interview, in which he is grilled on various topics while playing the eight songs he would bring with him to listen to on a deserted island.
Lastly, I read the quite enjoyable Medical Firsts by Robert Adler. I’ve read Adler before — last March, when I read his related Science Firsts. Medical Firsts contains a dozen chapters on innovative ideas and practices in medicine, all very readable and well-composed. The book is a good read about the history of medical science for even casual readers.
Pick of the Week: Bagombo Snuff Box, Kurt Vonnegut. This is easily my favorite short story collection of Vonnegut’s.
Quotation of the Week: “All men are created equal, endowed with reason sufficient to manage their own affairs and even to get to the heart of abstract and philosophical matters. The miracles attributed to the greatest prophets and religious leaders are tricks, no more real than the illusions of street-corner fakirs. People do not need rules handed down and enforced from one high to form orderly societies. In contrast, blind belief in the absolute truths of religions inspires fanaticism and hatred. All authorities and accepted knowledge need to be questioned. Each generation has the opportunity to move science forward through new observations and experimentation and because of such progress, society itself often advances.” – Abu Bakr al–Razi, as quoted-in-paraphrase in Medical Firsts. Razi died in Iran in the 900s.
Next Week:
  • The Age of American Unreason, Susan Jacoby.
  • Why Evolution is True, Jerry A. Coyne
  • Socrates Cafe, Christopher Phillips
  • A People’s History of the American Revolution, Ray Ralphael
  • (and perhaps) The Earl, Cecelia Holland.
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Medical Firsts

Posted on June 24, 2009 by smellincoffee

Medical Firsts: From Hippocrates to the Human Genome

© 2004 Robert Adler
232 pages
A little over a year ago, I read Science Firsts, a fairly enjoyable book that prepared me well for a summer focusing on the history of science and was pick of the week in its time. I wanted to read more from the author, but I had no access to this book, which is identical in approach and different in topic. Like Science Firsts, this book consists of a dozen chapters, each written on a particular innovation or novel approach in the field. The ideas are varied: the first chapter concerns Hippocrates’ patient-centered approach to medicine, another addresses the discovery of viral diseases, another is on the development of the Pill, and so on. Most of the innovations have a specific thinker attached, and so most of the book reads like Profiles in Medical History. The later chapters — concerning topics like the worldwide coordinated effort to destroy smallpox and the human genome project — focus more on the thing itself rather than the person driving the change. The personality-centered theme of the book isn’t necessarily a weakness: these men and women are worth honoring. (I don’t think I’d ever heard of Abu Bakr Al-Razi, but I’m glad I have now. According to Adler, he was a man of the Enlightenment before his time.) The chapters read well: I don’t think you have to be scientifically literate to enjoy them and learn something, and indeed I think the book is aimed for more casual readers.
Related Books:

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Blue Like Jazz

Posted on June 23, 2009 by smellincoffee

Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality

© 2003 Donald Miller
243 pages
In addition to my comparative religion and philosophy studies, I’m also trying to get a handle on why one religion in specific — Christianity — matters so much to people. I can appreciate Christianity just fine when people approach Jesus as a moral teacher, but when they start gushing about his dying for them, I’m lost. I don’t see the appeal. Christian theology on this point seems to me to be utterly arbitrary: “Okay, there was this one time when this guy named Adam disobeyed God, and got all of his relatives utterly cursed with this thing called sin. It separates us from God. But then, thousands of years later, God made a little love-child with a human and this guy let himself be killed so that you can live free of sin.” And I blink. If you tell me that the guys who died in Vietnam died for my right to vote, I’ll disagree but know where you’re coming from. But this sin thing? It’s arbitrary. You have to force belief onto a series of statements: one, that everyone is doomed to be a bad guy: two, that this is because of some taint called sin: three, that this sin can be dealt with by killing innocent beings: and that four, that Jesus was utterly innocent and was thus the ultimate sacrifice and his willing death ended sin’s power over people. I cannot force belief. I cannot make myself believe in arbitrary things even if I want to — and in this case, I certainly don’t want to. Now, if Christianity actually freed people from sin, this might give some credence to what they’re saying — but as far as I can tell, in all the lives I’ve observed first-hand and read about, in all the various approaches and interpretations, people who believe in Christ’s power over sin and who believe they are personally filled with his spirit still do bad things. Where’s the power? In the religion I was raised in, getting the “holy ghost” meant that you had this source of living sin-free inside you, that if you worked at it you could live a perfect life — but only through work. None of the forced beliefs made sense to me, and I was really concerned about the whole “most everyone is going to be tortured in a fiery pit forever” thing, so I said screw it and left organized religion. That’s when I realized I could change my life myself — so I became a self-empowered humanist and I’ve flourished ever since. But — in the past year I’ve found myself being able to get inside the minds of religious people and see what we have in common, and why we’re different, and I’m curious to see if I can get inside the head of a Saviour-Christ-believing Christian to understand. That’s what brings me to Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality.
Its title is a prelude to the things that come: it’s confusing. Author Donald Miller isn’t actually nonreligious. He’s nondenominational, which means that he has his own fundamentalist but fluid grasp on Christianity. The book is the story of his life, arranged topically and written in a manner that seems freeform. Although I’ve read “stream of consciousness”-type literature before and disliked it, I liked this: his writing style seemed to be quirky, fun, and lively. It’s like you’re listening to this guy talk to you, and he’s just leaning back against the wall in a cafe or restaurant and chatting about whatever comes to his mind — with some topical restrictions. He has spent his entire life grappling with what Christianity means to him, and the book is at times frustrating, insightful, muddled, mystical, uplifting, and funny. I suppose it’s like people: there are few people who you or I can say we like everything about. This book is that way, because it’s a look inside his head — and sometimes I liked what I saw there, and sometimes I didn’t. I despaired for him when he inflicted dogma on himself — fretting about having sex or drinking beer or not reading the Bible — and I was utterly confused when he started gushing about Jesus fixing his “Sin nature” — but there were times when I’d laugh or sit back with a smile because he’d made me laugh. I can’t understand the idea of having a personal relationship with a metaphysical being, but I do get thinking about values, and I do understand his thoughts about dealing with difficult people, because that’s something I think a lot about. Do I recommend the book to you? I don’t know, because I can’t get a firm handle on how I feel about the book. I know I like reading what other people have to say about it: I know this is the kind of book I’d like to hear people discuss and argue over, because it is a book about life and dealing with the meaning of it. What Miller says, you might not like — but then again you may. Both conservative Christians and former-Christians-turned-skeptic who I’ve read from dislike the book, and they both despair over its popularity among young Christian evangelicals. One of their particular beefs is that Miller doesn’t take Christianity seriously enough, but I disagree. His youth group doesn’t get together to have pizza — they go serve soup at homeless shelters. They try to live their lives with love, which I think is admirable, because it’s easy to talk about but hard to do. In this line of thought they criticize him for hand-waving away logical arguments against Christian dogma: as he says, the intellectual arguments about Christianity ceased to be about God a long time ago, so he doesn’t bother. While I understand why someone would think that wrong, I also suspect that religions are to the spiritual more about inspiration — not truth. Miller’s book is very much open to interpretation, I think.
Click here for a google search including the skeptical and conservative Christian viewpoints I mentioned earlier. I read the first, third, and fourth entries.
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Black Holes and Baby Universes

Posted on June 23, 2009 by smellincoffee

Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays

© 1993 Stephen Hawking
182 pages
Well, this is one book that recquires very little explaination. It’s a book of essays written by Stephen Hawking, most of them being on scientific topics. The beginning essays are biographical, and they work their way up to being chiefly science related: after a couple of essays about his life, he writes an essay on A Brief History of Time, which he calls “A Brief History of A Brief History“. From this point, Hawking moves on to theortical physics — black holes, quantum mechanics, free will vs. determinism, that kind of thing. After his final science essay (this one on the future of the universe, or rather potential futures), he ends the book with a transcript of an interview, the “Desert Island Discs” BBC interview. This is or was a hallmark program of the BBC, in which famous people were asked to bring eight records that they might bring with them if they were to be marooned on a desert island. The standard interview — covering topics in line with the theme of this book, namely his life and work — is periodically interupted by the reporter asking Hawkings to play one of his records in order. The interview ends with Hawkings being asked to choose a favorite among the records, and to talk about what book and luxury item he would plan on bringing. For those who are curious:
  1. Gloria, Poulenc
  2. Brahms Violin Concerto
  3. Beethoven’s String Quartet, Opus 132
  4. The Valkyrie, act one
  5. “Please Please Me”, the Beatles
  6. Requiem, Mozart
  7. Turandot, Puccini
  8. “Je Ne Regrette Rien”, Edith Piaf
His book is Middlemarch by George Eliot, and his luxury item a large supply of crème brûlée. The book is written in Hawkings’ usual way, although it lacks his fondness for illustrations. The science may be dated by this point, but it’s probably still a good read for Hawkings fans.
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Bagombo Snuff Box

Posted on June 21, 2009 by smellincoffee

Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Fiction

© 1999 Kurt Vonnegut
295 pages
For some reason, I enjoy reading Kurt Vonnegut. I find his novels and most of the short stories I’ve read of his hard to follow, but I enjoy them still. I was delighted to find this book a collection of very readable short stories — twenty-two, in fact, with an introduction by Vonnegut and a “Coda to my Career as a Writer for Periodicals” serving as literary bookends. He refers to them as a collection of “Buddhist catnaps”. The stories seem to be of his early works (pre-1953), and their settings are diverse. One takes place in Czechoslovaka as the war ends, while most seem to be set in immediate or early post-WW2 America. There is at least one speculative fiction story covering the otherworldly results from the US military’s attempt to put an intelligence operative into Earth orbit. Interestingly, three of the stories involve the same character — a high-school band teacher whose obsession with winning every band competition he can provides fuel for conflict. There are a lot of interesting stories here –what happens a brutal Godfather-type character who pretends to be Santa Claus is one of them. Most of the stories seem to be sly commentary about some issue or another, but even without this they would be quite enjoyable. If you can find it, do give it a try.
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Jesus

Posted on June 18, 2009 by smellincoffee
Jesus: A Story of Enlightenment
© 2008 Deepak Chopra
273 pages
Yesterday I wandered about in my library’s fiction section with the intention of letting something capture my eye. This “when the reader is ready, the book will come” approach didn’t seem to be working, so I decided to find a book by Michael Crichton. He’s been recommended to me before, but I’ve never read him before. Because I did not know how his last name was spelled — thinking it had an “H” — I found myself looking at the wrong bookshelves altogether, but while I looked my eyes saw the title Jesus. “Hmm“, I thought, “Interesting.” The full title was Jesus: A Story of Enlightenment. It was by Chopra, which gave me pause, but I opened it up to see Judas fretting about Romans looking for Jesus. “Ooh,” I thought, “The story of the gospels related in novel form? I’ll give it a go.”
That is not quite the case. Chopra introduces the book by writing that we know little of Jesus’ life between his birth and the beginnings of his time as a teacher, aside from one odd story about him getting separated from his family and teaching the rabbis in a local synagogue. Chopra therefore decided that someone should try to tell the story. Because we have no evidence from which to work, Chopra decided to use an “archetypal pattern” of people who have found enlightenment: I assume this is something along the lines of Campbell’s “hero’s journey” archetype. This may be the reason the story seems to lack historical depth or texture: although this is technically historical fiction, it’s incredibly shallow in that you could write the same book but just change the name of the Romans to another villain, and the name of the Jews to the name of another downtrodden people. George Lucas used a pattern, but he made the developing story his own: that doesn’t happen here.
As mentioned, the book is not a novel form of the gospels: it concerns Jesus as he was in his twenties, as a troubled and intuitive youth who feels compelled to search for answers to the meaning of suffering. This will set him on a somewhat brief journey to find answers, and he finally does in a range of snow-covered mountains when he encounters an old mystic who both introduces and ends the story. He does encounter two NT personalities who accompany him part of the way, namely Judas and Mary Magdalene. Chopra seems to be drawing on the Gospel of Judas when writing the ending, although he does paint Mary as a prostitute. My only knowledge about that subject is that one character in The Da Vinci Code called it a deceitful fabrication.
Previously I said that the book’s plot is shallow, with no historical context to ground it. I think the same is true of Jesus: he appears to be a character with dimensions at the start, but about two-fifths of the way in, Chopra suddenly replaces him with a Jesus who says things that are seemingly out of character: it’s like the author directly started making him say things instead of letting the character develop on his own. The character is used to say the same things Chopra said in The Third Jesus, which isn’t that surprising but still seems muddled. What I can say positively about the book is that the “visions” were well done: I was very wary at first, but Chopra did them in a way that was not intrusive and even believable.
I can’t say I would recommend this to someone looking for a gripping story, but if people find the titular character interesting, they will probably be able to enjoy this to some degree.
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This Week at the Library (17/6)

Posted on June 17, 2009 by smellincoffee

Books this Update

  • Third Degree, Greg Iles
  • Turning Angel, Greg Iles
  • God’s Problem, Brad Ehrman
  • The Third Jesus, Deepak Chopra
  • Further Along the Road Less Travelled, M. Scott Peck
  • Sleep No More, Greg Iles
  • Boss of Bosses, Joseph O’Brien and Andris Kurins
Given that Greg Iles‘ books make up half of this week’s reading — more if you consider page numbers — I’m going to break from format and deal with them all at once. I didn’t intend to read three of his thrillers in a single week, but circumstances made it possible and a little inevitable. The three Iles books are alike in that each are southern gothic thrillers — genuine page-turners. There’s a reason I was able to go through them so quickly, and that is that they are so damned readable. When I begin reading Iles, I can’t really put the book down even when I’m growing tired of him — as was the case at the ends of books two and three when I realized I was reading too much of Iles at once. Two of the books — Turning Angel and Sleep No More — are both set in the same setting as The Quiet Game, in the town of Natchez, Mississippi. They all have fairly unique plots, although my chief problem with both of the mentioned books is that they seem to have more sex in them than Playboy. The focus tends to shift away from the story and to fanfiction-style depictions of intimacy. Even so, each of the three plots fascinated me: in one, a suburban housewife is held a terrorized hostage in her own home , in another the death of a promising high schooler leads to the invasion of her town by Biloxi-based gangsters, and in the third a man is haunted by a woman who claims to be possessed by the spirit of his dead lover. Interesting stuff.
After the first two Iles thrillers, I read Bart Ehrman’s God’s Problem, in which he examines biblical attitudes toward suffering. He identifies four general attitudes, three of which are explanations and one of which is “don’t bother, it’s all a mystery”. Ehrman is thorough, interesting, and fair. His focus on one of the explanations helped the whole of the New Testament make sense to me, as he explains in part how Judaism changed through its exposure to Babylonian and later Persian thinking.
Next I read a book by Deepak Chopra called The Third Jesus. I am trying to understand various approaches to interpreting the life of Jesus, as he has never formerly been a personality that particularly interested me — despite growing up in a fundamentalist home. Chopra’s book was of little help. His interpretation of Jesus is of a “Transcendental Teacher” who teaches God-consciousnesses. Chopra does not explain his terms, apparently leaving them to be understand on some mystical level. Despite dealing with scientific and historical topics, he footnotes nothing and his rebuttals of various arguments for and against traditional interpretations of Jesus (Jesus as enlightened rabbi and Jesus as God-in-flesh-come-to-save-all-humankind) are almost nonexistent. The book was confusing, sloppy, and uninteresting to me.
Returning to Scott Peck was an enjoyable change from trying to read Chopra. Peck was a retired psychiatrist who attempted in his books to approach spirituality from that angle, seeing spirituality and psychiatry as interrelated disciplines. My own approach to spirituality is naturalistic, which is why I appreciate the psychological angle — even though Peck views psychiatry and psychology as supernatural disciplines, given that their object of study is in his view a supernatural thing. What I like about Peck is that he looks at mental problems like depression, guilt, and anxiety from a “That doesn’t have to be the case” perspective. Although he is most concerned with fixing these problems by examining their source and dealing with it, theoretically you could nip problems in the bud before they start overtaking your life. He deals with a lot of topics, and even though I don’t agree with him on a lot of things, I find him provocative.
Lastly, I read Boss of Bosses, a memoir written by two FBI agents detailing the rise and fall of Paul Castellano, who is referred to by his men as both “The Godfather” and “The Pope”. The book, written in the third person, tries to tell two stories at the same time: while its authors tell us of their initial investigations against Castellano, they often take breaks to inform us of his rise to power. Once this secondary story is finished, it renews itself in tracking his political fall. While the police investigation continues and a case is built up — using a planted microphone to give the agents an ear inside Castellano’s home — the kingpin himself is becoming increasingly isolated from the world which he once dominated, infatuated by his Hispanic maid-turned-mistress and his “performance problems”. When his career ends, it is not at the hands of the FBI agents who have come to respect his genteelness and who have sympathy for him, but at the hands of an ambitious young capo who sees Castellano as being a liability to the five families. The book tells an interesting story and offers a look into the thinking of the mob.
Pick of the Week: Third Degree, Greg Iles. The whole of its plot takes place in one day and the book is not marred by either excessive violence or sex. (There are both, but they don’t dominate the book like they did the two other Iles books.)
Quotation of the Week: “We’re not children here. The law is –how should I put it? A convenience. Or, a convenience for some people, and an inconvenience for other people. Like, take the law that says you can’t go into a guy’s house. I got a house, so hey — I like that law. But the guy without a house, what’s he think of it? ‘Stay out in the rain, schnook!’ That’s what the law means to him.” – Paul Castellano. This was one of my favorite quotations before reading the book, but its original source is apparently this book: Castellano utters those words to the authorial agents in their car after his arrest.
Next Week:
  • Jesus, Deepak Chopra. Given that I just read a book about Jesus by Deepak Chopra and disliked it, why am I reading another? Because this one is a novel.
  • Black Holes, Baby Universes, and Other Essays; Stephen Hawking
  • Medical Firsts, Robert Adler
  • Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality, Donald Miller
  • Bagombo Snuff Box, Kurt Vonnegut
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