Robert Gates has outlined a new Pentagon budget that supposedly shifts us away from reckless Cold War projects and toward gizmos more relevant to an endless counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan. Good. Looks like it’ll be a long haul.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates on Monday announced a broad reshaping of the Pentagon budget, with deep cuts in many traditional weapons systems but billions of dollars for new technology to fight the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The decisions represent the first sweeping overhaul of American military strategy under the Obama administration, which wants to spend more money on counterterrorism and less on preparations for conventional warfare against large nations like China and Russia.

And a reassuring word from a trustworthy talking head:

“Everybody seems to be focusing on that he’s making cuts,” said Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman. “He’s going to be adding a lot of things to capabilities that we need too.”

God forbid we actually cut anything from the most wasteful and destructive part of the national budget. After all, what could be done with the money we’d be saving?

via Gates Budget Plan Reshapes Pentagon’s Priorities – NYTimes.com.

The American Scene, a nice-looking, conservative-y blog I’ve recently discovered, has an interesting comment on my recent article in Seed:

Does anyone know when it was that bloggers, journalists, and others writing about religion made the choice to start using “god” instead of “God” to refer to … well, that’s sort of the problem, isn’t it? And if not when, does anyone know why they’ve made it?

Great question. I’m wondering the same thing, since in my final draft, every instance of the word was capitalized.

via Just Wondering | Culture | The American Scene.

Also, a report on the sorry state of name recognition; in Ross Douthat’s “Weekend Miscellany,” mine is the only link credited not to the author but to the publication.

There’s a nice little post at FaithWorld about how, in American religion surveys, being non-religious is hardly the same thing as being an atheist. In fact, according to the American Religious Identification Survey (the Trinity College “report” here mentioned), 2.3% percent of Americans said there’s no such thing as God, but only .7% were willing to call themselves atheists.

According to a new bit of number crunching by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, about 5 percent of Americans say they do not believe in God but only about a quarter of this group describe themselves as atheist. You can see the graphic here. About 15 percent of this group said they were agnostic while around a third said they were nothing in particular.

Pew draws its data from its massive nationwide U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, which was mostly conducted in 2007. It found that about 16 percent of Americans were unaffiliated with any religion, a figure often touted by activist non-believers. But it includes people who profess a belief in a god or gods, they just don’t have a specific affiliation.

Earlier this week we blogged and wrote about U.S. atheists and their efforts to become more vocal. A recent report from Connecticut’s Trinity College found 12 percent of Americans were atheists, agnostics or doubters. It put the number of self-professed atheists at 2.3 percent, another 4.3 percent said there is no way to know if God exists. About 6 percent said they were not sure about a deity.

via FaithWorld » Blog Archive » Few atheists among U.S. non-believers | Blogs |.

MZ Hemmingway of the blog GetReligion has a useful piece at Doublethink about abstinence-only education.

The liberal caricature of abstinence education is of school marms rapping the knuckles of teens and telling them—day after day—not to have sex. In fact, a review of curricula for abstinence education programs shows surprisingly little about sex—and a lot about building self-esteem, understanding risky behavior, finding responsible partners, and growing a family.

ReCapturing the Vision, one abstinence curriculum used for girls-only education, begins with a unit designed to help students see their bodies as beautiful and to accept themselves as they are. Other units teach them how to define their morals and values, resist negative influences, manage conflict and understand their emotions, and determine how to achieve personal, academic, professional, and financial goals. The final unit uses mock interviews, job searches, and résumé writing to help girls transition to adulthood.

Also throws in some rational-choice thinking to explain why teenage pregnancy might seem (or even actually be) appealing.

From the perspective of disadvantaged youth, the teen years might not be the worst ones in which to bear a child given government and parental help available at that time. And the upper-middle-class ideal of waiting until the end of one’s fecundity to pop out some babies, provided you haven’t mistakenly held off too long, probably seems downright odd. The fact is that millennia of history show teenage pregnancy isn’t exactly uncommon or unwelcome to humans. Just because the normal social encouragements in favor of delay (waiting for the involvement of an active father, a marriage, a stable income) have been swept aside as outmoded doesn’t mean the desire for children has also gone out the window.

…

In fact, the entire Planned Parenthood approach is to discuss teenage pregnancy as a physical malady to be prevented and treated rather than a mostly positive aspect of life that requires an appropriate context. There is no suggestion in Planned Parenthood’s sex education materials that it is ever desirable to be pregnant before the age of 20, even in the context of marriage.

By contrast, abstinence education focuses on decision-making and self-esteem boosting. It doesn’t tell teenagers that children will destroy your life, but that the more you make good decisions and dodge risks—by avoiding drugs and casual sex, by seeking a loving partner who respects you, by having children in the context of a family—the likelier you and your children are to be happy.

Hemmingway reveals how “abstinence education” means more than a wagging finger—there is potential there for a comprehensive and even empowering pedagogy. But is it being lived up to?

via AFF Doublethink Online » In a Family Way: The misunderstood philosophy of abstinence education.

Ah, the Economist, ever on the cutting edge of the latest trends. Don’t you just want to say, Duh?

In their new book, “God Is Back,” John Micklethwait, editor in chief of The Economist, and Adrian Wooldridge, that magazine’s Washington bureau chief, argue that religion is “returning to public life” around the world, that “the great forces of modernity — technology and democracy, choice and freedom — are all strengthening religion rather than undermining it,” that these days “religion is playing a much more important role in public and intellectual life.” They assert that “religion is becoming a matter of choice,” something that individuals themselves decide to believe in instead of something imposed upon them, and that “the surge of religion is being driven by the same two things that have driven the success of market capitalism: competition and choice.”

The market approach is right on, though. I’ve argued that neoliberal economy empties the public sphere of viable secular political options, making the transcendent reference of religion a necessity of sorts.

via Books of The Times – Almighty Empire in ‘God Is Back,’ by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge – Review – NYTimes.com.

Some years ago, I heard a presentation by The Icarus Project, a wonderful organization devoted to exploring the worlds and possibilities in people labeled as having mental illnesses. One of the founders had lived in the same co-ops that I lived in at Brown and, as a person with some such conditions in my family—truly on the border between brilliance and madness—their work has meant a lot to me.

I just noticed that their 2004 zine is now available for free download as a .pdf. I highly, highly recommend this.

This little book emerged from the stories of the many amazing members of The Icarus Project. We assembled the beautiful and jagged pieces of our collective experience, the lessons and the scars, to create an atlas of alternative maps to the particular breed of madness that gets called bipolar, and the ways people are making it through. Traveling through subconscious and waking worlds, from hospital waiting rooms to collective house kitchens, from the desert to the supermarket, these pages chart some of the underground tunnels beneath the mainstream medical model of treatment and the pathologizing language that alienates so many of us. These are maps made up of ideas and stories and examples from many people’s lives. Some of these maps will help you to navigate through the existing architecture of the mental health establishment; some of them might help you figure out for yourself where you stand in relation to the larger ecosystem of the earth and the people who inhabit it.

via Navigating the Space Between Brilliance and Madness Reader | The Icarus Project.

There has been a lot of chatter in the philosophical corners of the internet about these new revelations about Rawls’s religious past.

When John Rawls died in 2002, there was found among his files a short statement entitled “On My Religion”, apparently written in the 1990s. In this text Rawls describes the history of his religious beliefs and attitudes towards religion. He refers to a period during his last two years as an undergraduate at Princeton (1941–2) when he “became deeply concerned with theology and its doctrines”, and considered attending a seminary to study for the Episcopal priesthood. But he decided to enlist in the army instead, “as so many of my friends and classmates were doing”. By June of 1945, he had abandoned his orthodox Christian beliefs. With characteristic tentativeness and a disclaimer of self-knowledge, Rawls speculates that his beliefs changed because of his experiences in the war and his reflections on the moral significance of the Holocaust.

I keep meaning to start a collection of passages in which “religious” is used as a compliment to people who were explicitly unreligious.

Those who have studied Rawls’s work, and even more, those who knew him personally, are aware of a deeply religious temperament that informed his life and writings, whatever may have been his beliefs.

via John Rawls “On My Religion” Joshua Cohen and Thomas Nagel TLS.

Another in the reading-the-Bible-cleverly-and-ironically series, alongside A.J. Jacobs’s Year of Living Biblically. What are these books doing? Who is reading them, and what happens to folks who read them? Will this be recalled in a hundred years as the new Higher Criticism—Irreverent Criticism, in which humor brought about the final demise of the holy text’s authority?

David Plotz, the editor of Slate, reads the Hebrew Bible book by book, chapter by chapter, riffing as he goes. It’s CliffsNotes for Scripture — screenplay by Plotz, story by God — which is by turns entertaining, serious, shallow, profound, literal-minded, cute, ingratiating, hilarious.

Here’s Genesis 4:8, the Bible (King James version):

“And Cain talked with Abel his brother: and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him.”

And here’s Genesis 4:8, Plotz:

“The first murder — that didn’t take long.”

Plotz sets out the theological trajectory explicitly:

“He gives moments of beauty — sublime beauty and grace! — but taken as a whole, he is no God I want to obey, and no God I can love.”

via Book Review – ‘Good Book,’ by David Plotz – Review – NYTimes.com.

io9 is wondering whether Christian lit is taking over the sci-fi/fantasy world:

Never mind religion in Battlestar Galactica – is Christianity becoming the new trend for genre entertainment? While NBC’s Kings retells the story of King David, American Jesus brings Jesus back for a whole new audience.

And a warning:

The new culture wars may be about to invade your SF viewing pleasures. Be prepared.

via God Comes To Sci-fi: Is The Bible The New Comic Books?.

When I taught in an American religious history class in grad school, I gave the students an assignment for every class: they had to turn in a couple bits of “adventuresome thinking.” Whenever I said or heard that phrase, I thought of this man, the physicist and writer Freeman Dyson, about whom the Times magazine has a beautiful profile.

… he is an undeterred octogenarian futurist. “I don’t think of myself predicting things,” he says. “I’m expressing possibilities. Things that could happen. To a large extent it’s a question of how badly people want them to. The purpose of thinking about the future is not to predict it but to raise people’s hopes.”

It focuses mainly on Dyson’s dissent from global warming orthodoxy. [go!]