MachineMachine /stream - tagged with god http://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron text@machinemachine.net The God gap http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/b2004496-41c1-11e1-a1bf-00144feab49a.html#axzz1keb5eZxX/the-god-gap-ftcom The God Gap: http://t.co/gkEY64dU ]]> Sat, 28 Jan 2012 11:35:55 -0700 http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/b2004496-41c1-11e1-a1bf-00144feab49a.html#axzz1keb5eZxX/the-god-gap-ftcom Noise; Mutation; Autonomy: A Mark on Crusoe’s Island http://machinemachine.net/text/research/a-mark-on-crusoes-island

This mini-paper was given at the Escapologies symposium, at Goldsmiths University, on the 5th of December

Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe centres on the shipwreck and isolation of its protagonist. The life Crusoe knew beyond this shore was fashioned by Ships sent to conquer New Worlds and political wills built on slavery and imperial demands. In writing about his experiences, Crusoe orders his journal, not by the passing of time, but by the objects produced in his labour. A microcosm of the market hierarchies his seclusion removes him from: a tame herd of goats, a musket and gunpowder, sheafs of… ]]> Wed, 07 Dec 2011 09:50:14 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/text/research/a-mark-on-crusoes-island The Mystery of the Five Wounds http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/history/2011/11/the-mystery-of-the-five-wounds-ready-to-go/ Why, though, to begin with, did stigmata materialize in 13th-century Italy? Part of the answer seems to lie in the theological trends of the time. The Catholic Church of St. Francis’s day had begun to place much greater stress on the humanity of Christ, and would soon introduce a new feast day, Corpus Christi, into the calendar to encourage contemplation of his physical sufferings. Religious painters responded by depicting the crucifixion explicitly for the first time, portraying a Jesus who was plainly in agony from wounds that dripped blood. Indeed, the contemporary obsession with the marks of crucifixion may best… ]]> Mon, 21 Nov 2011 13:07:55 -0700 http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/history/2011/11/the-mystery-of-the-five-wounds-ready-to-go/ Theology is Dead http://t.co/xjay4VC/great-read-theology-is-dead-quotthere-is-in-accord-with-reasons-movement-no-name-to-which-another-is-not-opposed-httptcoxjay4vc-x Great read: Theology is Dead "...there is, in accord with reason’s movement, no name to which another is not opposed” http://t.co/xjay4VC #x ]]> Tue, 23 Aug 2011 10:52:46 -0700 http://t.co/xjay4VC/great-read-theology-is-dead-quotthere-is-in-accord-with-reasons-movement-no-name-to-which-another-is-not-opposed-httptcoxjay4vc-x The Science of Nothing; The Philosophy of Everything http://tumblr.machinemachine.net/post/9037022482

The Physics of Nothing; The Philosophy of Everything

]]> Wed, 17 Aug 2011 05:34:00 -0700 http://tumblr.machinemachine.net/post/9037022482 Oh, Infinite Stream of Data and Light http://killingthebuddha.com/mag/icon/oh-infinite-stream-of-data-and-light/ Visitors enter the dark, gargantuan room and take up postures of reverence in front of a massive screen, which towers 40 feet above them. They take off their shoes at the edge of the white floor—the sort used in dance studios—laid across the room’s stripped wooden floorboards. They sit down in front of the screen with legs crossed, rapt in attention. Some lay flat on their backs. Others press their bodies up against the vertical screen and let the sound and light play over them. Strips of black and white flash across the screen in varying configurations, loosely attuned to… ]]> Thu, 16 Jun 2011 16:22:37 -0700 http://killingthebuddha.com/mag/icon/oh-infinite-stream-of-data-and-light/ When the King Saved God http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2011/05/hitchens-201105 Four hundred years ago, just as William Shakespeare was reaching the height of his powers and showing the new scope and variety of the English language, and just as “England” itself was becoming more of a nation-state and less an offshore dependency of Europe, an extraordinary committee of clergymen and scholars completed the task of rendering the Old and New Testaments into English, and claimed that the result was the “Authorized” or “King James” version. This was a fairly conservative attempt to stabilize the Crown and the kingdom, heal the breach between competing English and Scottish Christian sects, and bind… ]]> Tue, 12 Apr 2011 15:57:36 -0700 http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2011/05/hitchens-201105 The New Athe­ists' Nar­row Worldview http://chronicle.com/article/The-New-Athe-ists-Nar-row/126027/ With tongues in cheeks, Rich­ard Daw­kins, Chris­to­pher Hitch­ens, Sam Har­ris, and Dan­iel Dennett are embracing their reputation as the "Four Horsemen." Lampoon­ing the anx­i­eties of evan­geli­cals, these best-sell­ing athe­ists are em­brac­ing their "dan­gerous" sta­tus and dar­ing be­liev­ers to match their for­mi­da­ble philo­soph­i­cal acu­men.

Ac­cord­ing to these sol­diers of rea­son, the time for re­li­gion is over. It clings like a bad gene rep­li­cat­ing in the pop­u­la­tion, but its use­ful­ness is played out. Sam Har­ris's most re­cent book, The Moral Land­scape (Free Press, 2010), is the lat­est in the continuing bat­tle. As an ag­nos­tic, I find much of the… ]]> Mon, 24 Jan 2011 03:58:29 -0700 http://chronicle.com/article/The-New-Athe-ists-Nar-row/126027/ Manguel, Muse of Impossibility http://www.threepennyreview.com/samples/manguel_f10.html One day in December 1919, the twenty-year-old Jorge Luis Borges, during a short stay in Seville, wrote a letter, in French, to his friend Maurice Abramowicz in Geneva, in which, almost in passing, he confessed to Abramowicz contradictory feelings about his literary vocation: “Sometimes I think that it’s idiotic to have the ambition of being a more or less mediocre maker of phrases. But that is my destiny.”

As Borges was well aware even then, the history of literature is the history of this paradox. On the one hand, the deeply rooted intuition writers have that the… ]]> Thu, 21 Oct 2010 03:52:00 -0700 http://www.threepennyreview.com/samples/manguel_f10.html Cosmology, Cambridge Style: Wittgenstein, Toulmin, and Hawking http://chronicle.com/article/Cosmology-Cambridge-Style-/124568 That headline flashed to all corners of the media universe this month. Of course, we don't know whether a universe has corners. Truth is, we don't know much about the universe that isn't astonishingly inferential. Alas, you'd hardly know that from listening to the retired Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge and his media echo chamber.

The breaking news originated in the latest book by Stephen Hawking, The Grand Design (Bantam), co-written with physicist Leonard Mlodinow. It excited front-page editors as few science tomes do. Britain's Mirror exclaimed, "Good Heavens! God Did Not Create… ]]> Thu, 30 Sep 2010 16:21:00 -0700 http://chronicle.com/article/Cosmology-Cambridge-Style-/124568 Infinite Life http://www.tnr.com/article/76715/infinite-life?passthru=MDBkMjEwNTgzZjNhNGZmYjBhNzEzZTdiZmVlZDk0Nzg A starry firmament, or sand cascading through one’s open fingers, or weeds springing up time after time: the first conception of infinity, of the uncountable and the unending, is not recorded, but it must have been stimulated by experiences such as these. It may have merged in the mind of an ancient progenitor with thoughts of a God, a possessor of unlimited might, an infinite being itself. But whether or not the idea of God was born with the first thoughts of what cannot be counted, this wonderful book by an American historian of science and a French mathematician teaches… ]]> Thu, 05 Aug 2010 03:18:00 -0700 http://www.tnr.com/article/76715/infinite-life?passthru=MDBkMjEwNTgzZjNhNGZmYjBhNzEzZTdiZmVlZDk0Nzg Goodbye to the Graphosphere http://nplusonemag.com/goodbye-to-the-graphosphere For half a millennium, across continents and civilizations, the human readership did almost nothing but grow and consolidate itself. Constantly more people in more and more places could read, and could read more books more cheaply, with increasing ease. And not only were they able to do this, but they chose to. It would be astonishing to learn, if some retrospective survey could be carried out, that hours per head spent reading didn’t increase across all capitalist or otherwise modernizing countries (most Communist regimes having been energetic promoters of literacy) until at least the middle of the past century. ]]> Sat, 17 Jul 2010 12:36:00 -0700 http://nplusonemag.com/goodbye-to-the-graphosphere The Three Christs of Ypsilanti: What happens when three men who identify as Jesus are forced to live together? http://www.slate.com/id/2255105/ In the late 1950s, psychologist Milton Rokeach was gripped by an eccentric plan. He gathered three psychiatric patients, each with the delusion that they were Jesus Christ, to live together for two years in Ypsilanti State Hospital to see if their beliefs would change. The early meetings were stormy. "You oughta worship me, I'll tell you that!" one of the Christs yelled. "I will not worship you! You're a creature! You better live your own life and wake up to the facts!" another snapped back. "No two men are Jesus Christs. … I am the Good Lord!" the third interjected,… ]]> Sat, 12 Jun 2010 09:18:00 -0700 http://www.slate.com/id/2255105/ Michelangelo's secret message in the Sistine Chapel http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=michelangelos-secret-message-in-the-2010-05-26 At the age of 17 he began dissecting corpses from the church graveyard. Between the years 1508 and 1512 he painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. Michelangelo Buonarroti—known by his first name the world over as the singular artistic genius, sculptor and architect—was also an anatomist, a secret he concealed by destroying almost all of his anatomical sketches and notes. Now, 500 years after he drew them, his hidden anatomical illustrations have been found—painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, cleverly concealed from the eyes of Pope Julius II and countless religious worshipers, historians, and art… ]]> Tue, 01 Jun 2010 02:44:00 -0700 http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=michelangelos-secret-message-in-the-2010-05-26 Believe it or Not http://www.firstthings.com/article/2010/04/believe-it-or-not I think I am very close to concluding that this whole “New Atheism” movement is only a passing fad—not the cultural watershed its purveyors imagine it to be, but simply one of those occasional and inexplicable marketing vogues that inevitably go the way of pet rocks, disco, prime-time soaps, and The Bridges of Madison County. This is not because I necessarily think the current “marketplace of ideas” particularly good at sorting out wise arguments from foolish. But the latest trend in à la mode godlessness, it seems to me, has by now proved itself to be so intellectually and morally… ]]> Sun, 16 May 2010 16:19:00 -0700 http://www.firstthings.com/article/2010/04/believe-it-or-not Thinking Again http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/thinking-again Then there is the odd privilege of existence as a coherent self, the ability to speak the word “I” and mean by it a richly individual history of experience, perception, and thought. For the religious, the sense of the soul may have as a final redoubt, not as argument but as experience, that haunting I who wakes us in the night wondering where time has gone, the I we waken to, sharply aware that we have been unfaithful to ourselves, that a life lived otherwise would have acknowledged a yearning more our own than any of the daylit motives whose… ]]> Sun, 16 May 2010 16:17:00 -0700 http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/thinking-again Conceiving God: the Cognitive Origin and Evolution of Religion http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2010/04/religion-religious-lewis Atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens confront the faithful head-on, but there may be another way to dispel religious beliefs.

I am not so sure about this. In my experience, waverers and Sunday-only observers can find forthright challenges to religious pretensions
a relief and a liberation. They give them the reason, sometimes the courage, to abandon those shreds of early-acquired religious habit that cling around their ankles and trip them up.

Still, Darwin and David Lewis-Williams have a point in thinking, as the former put it, that "direct arguments against [religion] produce… ]]> Sun, 04 Apr 2010 06:56:00 -0700 http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2010/04/religion-religious-lewis The Nightline Face-Off: Does God Have a Future? (1 of 12) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-8-Yxdphsg&feature=youtube_gdata ]]> Fri, 26 Mar 2010 05:21:00 -0700 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-8-Yxdphsg&feature=youtube_gdata Avatar and the Flight from Reality http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/avatar-and-the-flight-from-reality In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “The Artist of the Beautiful” (1844), a prototypical nerd with few social graces and no head for business turns a watchmaker’s shop into an artist’s studio where, ultimately, he creates a clockwork butterfly in every way indistinguishable from a real butterfly except in its being even more beautiful. Although most of the story is about how misunderstood this nerdy clockmaker is, Hawthorne’s deeper concern is the fundamental mistake of supposing that the idea of artistic creation is not just to create something that is like reality but rather something that amounts to a new reality,… ]]> Sun, 21 Mar 2010 12:55:00 -0700 http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/avatar-and-the-flight-from-reality Divine Wilderness http://canopycanopycanopy.com/7/divine_wilderness PLANNING IS SOMETHING that people learned from God. The lesson might be said to have begun with the prescriptions God laid out for His earthly habitation among the Israelites: the Tabernacle that housed Him in the desert, and then the Temple that was His residence in Jerusalem. The dimensions of these structures were dictated by a divine blueprint. The Temple gave birth to a city, and from it emerged a civilization. We are descendants of this tradition, irrespective of such trivialities as whether one identifies as a “believer.” ]]> Fri, 08 Jan 2010 10:02:00 -0700 http://canopycanopycanopy.com/7/divine_wilderness