About that Recent Red Meat Study

I have been tempted to switch to vegetarian or even vegan diets on occasion, mostly out of compassion for sentient life, particularly the way sentient life is treated in factory farms throughout the world. Although I have never made the switch, I do go through periods where I eat less or even no animal flesh, and I try to get my dairy and eggs from a local farm (personal circumstances don't always make this possible). But while humans evolved to be able to eat a varied diet, vegan or even vegetarian diets require planning to provide deficiencies of various nutrients.. VeganHealth.org is a good resource on this topic.


Anyway, reading articles from the Western A. Price Foundation website many years ago also convinced me that the dangers of cholesterol, saturated fats, and animal proteins were largely or completely unfounded, which is why I was interested in the recently published study on red meat that claimed it was bad for you in multitudinous ways. Yesterday, however, a friend of mine who has similar views on nutrition sent me the following link: Will Eating Red Meat Kill You? Here's a quote to get you started:

In case you’re skeptical that observational studies can run disturbingly contrary to reality, look no further than the hormone replacement therapy (HRT) craze that peaked a few decades ago. By 1991, 30 observational studies—including this one based on none other than the Nurses’ Health data—collectively showed that women taking estrogen seemed to have a 44% reduction in heart disease risk compared to their non-hormone-replacing counterparts. Naturally, this led literally millions of women to jump on the estrogen bandwagon in pursuit of better health and longer lives. A very unfortunate oopsie-daisy sprouted up later when some randomized, controlled trials finally emerged and revealed that rather than being protective, hormone replacement therapy actually increased heart disease risk by 29%!

 Give the article a look see.

The Dark Side of Dolphins

I am currently helping take care of some tropical fish (such as angelfish, rainbow cichlids, parrotfish). Nature red in tooth and claw indeed! Aggressive, territorial... unpleasant animals. Pleasant to look at, though.

That got me thinking about a previous post of mine titled Dolphins as Persons. Yes, dolphins are very intelligent animals, and like another intelligent species they are set apart by cruel behavior that less clever animals don't seem capable of. Sexual aggression of males against females is particularly disturbing, as is killing for the sake of killing, since these are behaviors that seem to spring simply from sadistic feelings rather than having some evolutionary justification -- also much like another intelligent species I can think of.

Information on this less savory side of dolphins isn't difficult to find. You could start with this brief Slate article from 2009.

A more closely related intelligent-and-sadistic species is the common chimpanzee. Natural is not always good, at least from a human point of view. And what does it mean to "be in touch with nature"? If it means to be in touch with our human nature... humans may have a much more pliable nature and instincts than other animals, but what does that mean for a Pagan? To surrender ourselves to our animal nature is often a good thing, but it can also be a bad thing as well. Addictions, for example; not just for drugs but for food or sex or other behaviors. To "act naturally" is often to to debase rather than elevate ourselves. Again: what does it really mean for a Pagan to be "in touch with nature"?

Anyway, I'm rambling now and getting off topic: I will follow up these thoughts with a post later on how old Paganism differed from today's variety, via a couple passages from Marcus Aurelius.

70 Degrees on March 12

From Think Progress. This is a must-read post on the state of the climate after what has for most of us been a warm winter:

We've been Through Climate Changes Before: But Mostly Cold Ones And Mostly In Our Far Distant Past

Worship as Obedience

I am dissatisfied with my two previous posts on religion as worship, so I have decided to approach the question from a different direction.

All religions ask us to do many things, the reasons for some of which we may not understand -- even Neopaganisms! In traditional Buddhism, for example, a lot of emphasis is placed on faith that the Buddha has the true Dharma (teaching) and that it is preserved by the Sangha (monastic community), so when Buddhists are in danger of becoming discouraged by their lack of progress in meditation, they reinforce our faith through an act of will.

In Christianity and other theistic faiths, things are little different, or at least they seem so to me. In these religions, the tenets of faith are given by a divine person, and breaking the rules becomes, at least in part, an act of disobedience. A serious, faithful Christian obeys the commands of God at least partly because he or she believes obedience to be essential to the religion. After all, with full understanding there would be no faith (at least for the Christian), but where we don't understand we must have another reason to believe, and that reason is often obedience to God.

Obedience. Let that sink in. Every day, day in and day out, Christians obey commands that they may not fully understand, that they might have reasons for believing are not to be obeyed, yet they obey them anyway because that is what God commands. This goes directly against the instincts of most of us in a modern, democratic, individualist society. For us, freedom is the rule except when it impinges on the freedom of others. So what do you do? Do you (a) change your religious beliefs to suit modernity ("God doesn't really hate gays!"); (b) abandon your religious beliefs, perhaps adopting others more compatible with your individualist values; (c) change your secular values to conform to your religious values; or (d) keep both conflicting value systems, obedience in religion and individualism in daily life?

I believe most faithful, conservative Christians choose a mix of (c) and (d). It's certainly possible to live this kind of double life; it isn't rationally out of bounds; but I think humans find that kind of double standard difficult to live with. If God is real, and we are used to obeying him, then obedience takes on a positive cast in our minds. Humans think by association more than strict logic, and if you are accustomed to thinking of your relationship with God as one where you are the servant (see Paul in the New Testament) and God is the commander, then that will naturally carry over into the rest of your life.

Obedience. Obedience to God is good, so obedience becomes, by natural association, the natural and good way for society to order itself. Need I spell out the implications this has for the political order? How about the family order?

This isn't to say that all Christians are fascists or that Christian families are authoritarian. There are many reasons why this isn't the case: for one, there are other messages about kindness and mercy in Christianity (and Judaism, and Islam) that offset this tendency. For another, people do not always follow this slippery slope perfectly. There is friction along the way. But I do believe that we see this tendency among Christians and other theistic believers, and for the reason I outline above.

If Christianity were true, we would just have to live with this fact of obedience. But it isn't, and if we choose to follow a Pagan path, then we must decide how we are going to interact with the divine. Will it be one of obedience? Of service, perhaps? Of communion? Perhaps a mixture of these and more? I don't know, but I know that I no longer think much of worship, at least insofar as it leads to the kind of authoritarianism I have outlined in these posts.

Does the Cato Institute Need Saving?

The Cato Institute has a reputation among the left of being not much more more than a conservative think tank (sometimes recognized as libertarian) that serves the whims of the Koch brothers, which is why the recent plea by executive vice president David Boaz to "Save the Cato Institute" from their very benefactors should be so interesting to progressives... but has been largely ignored or, worse, dismissed as something that the left shouldn't care about at all (see many of the comments at a Daily Kos post here). I think this attitude is completely wrongheaded, and here's why.

Largely as a side effect of my mostly unread ramblings here, I have begun to embrace my Marxist and socialist leanings and now read more progressive websites and blogs. And what I have noticed is that while progressives are better than conservatives at sticking to the facts, they are far from perfect. They cherry pick. They distort. They commit all the cardinal sins of conservatives of twisting the facts to fit their views. The main difference is that they aren't as bad as the conservatives.

This is why we need the libertarian Cato Institute. Yes, it cherry picks and distorts the facts when it wants to, but it also calls out both progressives and run-of-the-mill conservatives when they do the same. The left needs fact checkers like those at Cato to keep them honest! Conservative think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute aren't good enough when both they and the progressives agree on something or whose views are not that far apart.

Take the war on drugs, for example. The GOP is generally speaking all for it. The Democratic Party has a wide range of voices on the subject, but when push comes to shove they follow the GOP line (just look at the way Obama has changed his tune so dramatically once in office). And few Democrats are as radically in favor of drug legalization as the Cato Institute, which holds that position for a variety of reasons, the most important of which, from a progressive point of view, is the harm drug prohibition does to the poor and minorities.

To wit: the left needs a voice like Cato that is unusually independent and provides unusually honest policy analysis.

"A New Age of Reformation"

I spend a lot of my day listening to podcasts of NPR programs, among them On Point with Tom Ashbrook. On Thursday the author of Christianity After Religion, Diana Butler Bass, was on the show talking about her new book. I haven't read the book, but the show was an interesting conversation on the way Americans were expressing their religiosity as Christians in recent decades, and especially over the last ten or fifteen years. To wit, they are leaving organized religion, but not necessarily religion altogether.

Give it a listen if you're interested.

Now I'm waiting for them to do a program on the growth of Paganism..

Four Sayings by a Buddhist Monk

The Venerable Master Hsing Yun is a famous Chinese Buddhist monk. Last year, someone I know went to a temple associated with him in L.A. and took a photo of a sign called "Phrases from Ven. Master Hsing Yun." I thought the sentiments they express are worth recording here:

Magnanimity is the most beautiful worship.

Faith is the best virtue.

Contentment is the greatest fortune.

Health is the most genuine wealth.

The Chinese appears above each of these English phrases. I can vouch for the accuracy of the translation.