Lisa told me about the Berkeley physics auction, which has since become a big deal (appearing in several blogs, in the SF Gate, and now even on slashdot). I don't know if the auction house will be able to deal with the crowds easily.
The backlash from the Newdow decision is really troubling me. Sometimes it's easy to think that the U.S. is mainly made up of people who don't mind being secular and pluralist and are comfortable with an aggressive and conscious separation of church and state. But, in fact, this is probably not true.
Q. How do you think about the religious references in the Declaration of Independence?
A. The people who were writing that Declaration all did believe in some sense in a Creator, etc., although not all of them had mainstream Christian beliefs. When you come round to the Constitution, the representatives were not very representative (no women, no black people, no poor people, no Jews, etc.), but they no longer mentioned their personal religious beliefs in the document. (I don't know whether or not there was greater religious diversity in the Constitutional Convention than in the original Continental Congress; I understand that the Convention contained Quakers and Deists, both of whom were likely to be disestablishmentarians.) Even if the Congress and the Convention had been identical in their membership, I see very little conflict between the statements of a group of people engaged in a revolutionary struggle and the subsequent efforts of some of those people to create a neutral, pluralist government. The Declaration is (among other things) a much more personal statement.
A parable. Let's say there is a mainly-Muslim nation which has been oppressed by some hegemony (perhaps Soviet, perhaps Chinese, although I don't want to place this parable in actually-existing history). A significant part of the oppression, maybe, was an attempt to prevent the free practice of Islam. A group of revolutionaries gather and issue a statement: "In the name of Allah, the most merciful, we will fight to liberate our nation and defend our rights." They proceed to actually fight, or maybe they don't need to fight and simply engage in successful diplomacy, and subsequently they actually do liberate the nation, and they get together and declare: "We will create a modern state which will be secular and pluralist and protect to every one the freedom of religion." Should they not do this, and instead create a theocracy? Even if they don't create a theocracy, should they decide to create a "Muslim state" simply because the revolutionaries themselves are Muslims?
Google searches for "Seth" are still yielding better results for Seth as in channeling than for Seth as in Schoen. (Seth was the name given to a personality Jane Roberts claimed she was channelling; there are many books of his metaphysical teachings.)
My name means "appointed" in Hebrew (see Genesis 4). My last name means "beautiful" in German. (Don't write to haesslich@loyalty.org.) In elementary school, they taught us LOGO, and we all tried typing our names in as LOGO commands. Most students got things like
> katherine
I don't know what to do with katherine.
or
> rachel
I don't know what to do with rachel.
But I was the only one in the whole class whose name was a valid LOGO primitive:
> seth
Not enough arguments to seth.
Sumana and Leonard visited me, and other people visited Zack at the same time, and the house was full and hopping.
There were a couple of good jokes in my conversation with Sumana, but I don't remember them now, so I can't report on them.
Smith College will host the 13th conference on Virginia Woolf in 2003. (My mother is the webmaster!)
An O'Reilly piece (by Tim O'Reilly) linked from slashdot today is excellent. There are many subtle and important observations in it.
Contact: Seth David Schoen
