Astronomy

Four hundred years ago, Johannes Kepler worked out the motions of the planets around the sun, and discovered a mathematical basis for determining the location of any planet at any time in history. In doing so, he plotted the positions of the planets back to 7 BCE, and discovered that in that year, the planet Saturn had passed behind Jupiter. Because of the motion of the Earth relative to the other planets, an Earth-bound observer would have seen Saturn appear to merge with Jupiter, then reverse its motion and pass Jupiter again, then move in regular orbital motion once more. Astronomers and astrologers call this a triple conjunction; they occur at irregular intervals. The last one took place in 1981, and the next one will take place in 2238.

In the Middle Eastern astrology of the time, the planet Jupiter had an association with kingship, and Saturn had an association with Judea.To the astrologers of the first century Mediterranean basin, and probably to the Zoroastrian astrologer-priests known as the Magi, a triple conjunction between Saturn and Jupiter would have meant the birth of a new king for Judea, then ruled by a puppet king and a Roman imperial governor.

The basic unit of astronomic distance, the light year, indicates distances and speeds that we find difficult to grasp. A single light year contains over nine trillion kilometres; if every man, woman, and child on Earth traveled the distance between Toronto and Winnipeg, we would cumulatively have traveled about one light year. Yet we can see the Andromeda Galaxy, two and a half million light years away, with our own eyes; and telescopes can detect the light of objects even farther away. Darkness does not overcome light.

These things we know from observation and from calculation; what Ursula LeGuin called "number the indispoutable". Other things we experience; the sense that the birth of a child brings a chance for redemption and renewal, and experience of birth as a spiritual, rather than just a biological, event. And sacred writings handed down to us over the centuries tell us still more:

But the angel said to them, ‘Do not be afraid; for see—I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is the Messiah,^* the Lord. (Luke 2:10-11)

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Will someone save these people from themselves?

Last week I rented and watched The Queen, a superb performance by Helen Mirren as Elizabeth II struggling to come to terms with the changes in British and world culture that intruded into her life after the death of Princess Diana. In it, Tony Blair lets out a cry for someone to "save these people from themselves", after some particularly tone-deaf behaviour from Buckingham Palace.

That phrase sums up my response to the behaviour of the global environmental movement before and during Copenhagen. The conference itself, with its focus on long-range goals and dire threats a decade hence showed how not to address a problem in an international forum. It didn't help that a batch of emails that showed the environment movement and climate science in the worst possible light had surfaced right before Copenhagen.

George Monbiot took care to criticize the tone-deaf scientists who wrote up the climate emails. But if he wants to know why so many people eagerly bought the idea that these emails convicted climate scientists, and the whole climate movement, of fraud, he and fellow environmental campaigners should take a look in the mirror. Romantics who fantasize about "redefining humanity", or "changing our culture from the ground up" and forcing everyone into a life where less is more do more to convince millions of average people that their happiness and prosperity depends on cheap energy, and carbon emissions, than all the propagandists big oil and big coal can possibly buy.

Just to make things worse, Mr. Monbiot embraced the prospect of an alliance with NIMBY groups, not grasping (or not caring) that most NIMBY positions, as well as deeply inconsistent, also reflect the interests, economic and otherwise, of relatively privileged communities. The poor worry about literacy, schools for their kids, and jobs. The rich have the leisure and political influence to try to dump the airport on the neighbours.

If anyone really believed that introducing themselves as the people who will save us from ourselves would help the environment movement make progress, the fate of the Copenhagen Conference should give us all a clue that it won't. As someone who participated in one of the early green transportation experiments at the end of the seventies, I have three suggestions:

1. Get the engineers together and have them start talking about what we can accomplish. technically, right now. Not ten years in the future, now. We have the technology to build windjammers and use them for slow freight, right now. We have planes in the air, today, that produce about 30% of the global warming effect of high altitude jets. Solve the problems; make lifestyle change the absolute last resort.
2. Quit treating the issue as the supposed moral and philosophical failings of European culture. If you think life has a higher purpose than working for the weekend so you can head to Walmart and shop 'til you drop, make that case. Don't saddle the environment with all the hopes for personal, political, social and economic redemption you can't sell without the prospect of environmental apocalypse. The majority of the world doesn't live near a Walmart; their life savings would not buy a pair of fashionable running shoes, and they cannot afford to wait while we save the souls of over privileged Westerners.
3. Let us see this as a problem we can solve, a challenge, even, dare I say it, as exciting, even fun. If Kennedy had tried to sell the prospect of landing on the moon by telling Americans to make do with less, go dumpster diving, and lament their profligate ways, the moon landing would have gone the way of the Copenhagen conference. We could afford not to send a man to the moon. If the scientists have thier climate predictions right, we cannot afford to fail on global warming.
   

Lies I tell to soldiers

I don't tell the lies directly, but politicians and poets tell them for me.

1. We will remember your sacrifice forever. Since we ask for absolute sacrifice from soldiers, sailors, and combat aviators, we offer them unlimited memory. But while many of us make an effort remember the men and women who sacrificed their lives on our behalf, wars fade into history, and thus, sadly, irrelevance over at most ten or fifteen generations. Since most of the young men we send off to die in war give up any hope of making a mark on the world by something other than their sacrifice, we owe them the truth.
   
2. You died in a noble and necessary cause. Most Canadian soldiers who died over the past century have died in worthy causes. But a dishonesty at the heart of this statement poisons it, because we would ask our soldiers to die even in bad cause. So many people just like ourselves have sent their children to die in manifestly unjust causes over the centuries that it would take extreme egotism to believe we would not do the same. I remember a Remembrance Day hymn from long ago: "tranquil you lie, your knightly virtue proved, your memory hallowed in the land you loved", that captures the problem perfectly. It implies that all soldiers fighting for a cause they love prove their virtue and earn the love of their compatriots. But in saying that soldiers who died for a cause they believed in deserve honour in memory, even if they died for Hitler's Germany, we contradict the argument that the soldiers we and our forbears sent to die did so in a noble, or at least a necessary, cause.
3. We will put an end to war after this one. Fewer politicians have told this lie recently; I do not know whether I should welcome a break from hypocrisy, or despair at the thought that so many people seem comfortable at the thought of war as a means of settling political disputes going on into the indefinite future. Whatever politicians today have taken to saying, though, millions of young men still lie under graves in Flanders from two wars which politicians promised them would end war. Every time we go to war either reluctantly or eagerly, we break faith with two generations of young men, who went through horrors so that we could have lasting peace. 

I also tell soldiers two things that definitely are not lies:

1. Thank you for your service. While I wish fervently and work for an end to all war, I know that it will take hard work and struggle to accomplish it. How can I not honour the impulse that leads men and women to service and sacrifice?
   
2. I wish you safe return. May you come home whole in body and mind, to a warm welcome.
   

A religious argument for same-sex marriage

A few days ago, I posted about the temporal argument for same-sex marriage. Since the secular debate about same-sex marriage in Canada has pretty much ended, I thought I would take on the more important issue that still faces Canadians and others of faith: what does the Creator, who created us man and woman, but quite possibly also Gay and straight, wants for us.

I believe this: the Christian church should affirm and give thanks for loving and committed and caring relationships, same-sex and otherwise. In Mark 12:29-31, Jesus says: Jesus answered, ‘The first is, “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.” The second is this, “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” There is no other commandment greater than these.’ (NRSV) The Gospels make clear that no commandment can contradict these; that any interpretation of the scriptures that would allow us to act in a less than loving manner to our neighbour must necessarily contain an error. Luke records Jesus's answer to the question "who is my neighbour?" with an answer that takes us to the heart of the question: what does the Creator want us to do for one another. He says (Luke 10:30-37, NRSV) "...a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii,* gave them to the innkeeper, and said, “Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.” Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbour to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?’ He said, ‘The one who showed him mercy.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Go and do likewise.’ In other words, Jesus sets the standard of love for neighbour as practical compassion. Nor does Luke speak alone here: Matthew, in one of the few places where the gospels record Our Lord speaking in uncompromising terms of condemnation and judgment, says that Christ will call out as blessed those who have visited the despised and the outcast in prison and in sickness, shared food and shelter with them, and by doing so will have done so to Him. (Matthew 25:31-46)

What does this mean when we confront someone in a faithful, committed relationship with someone whom they deeply love, asking for our blessing? Consider the parable of the Good Samaritan, the summary of the law, or Jesus's teaching us about how He will judge the nations: these lessons do not suggest to me that we should say to people, sorry, you do the wrong thing with your pelvis, and the person you love has the wrong chromosome. And I emphasize once again: these lessons go to the heart of the Gospel message. Mark and Luke both drive home the point that the Great commandments of Deuteronomy 6 and Leviticus 19:18 make up the heart of the Christian ethical message. I do not believe that condemning two people in a loving relationship accords with the spirit of these commandments, or with Jesus's teachings about them.

A field guide to dud arguments: the temporal red herring

A long time ago, I used to participate in a usenet forum on capital punishment. That experience gave me an up-close view of all the common logical fallacies, and I eventually developed a list of "dud" arguments: arguments made (by both sides) which contained one or more logical fallacies.

I hope to make this the first of a series of web-log posts exploring bad logic as I encounter it today, in issues of municipal government, in provincial issues, and national and international issues as well.

Over the past year, I have repeatedly heard variants of the phrase: "you can't turn back the clock". It frequently appears in arguments about modes of transportation, where opponents of cycling have attempted to paint the bicycle as a "nineteenth century" mode of transportation, and advocates for "developing" Toronto's port lands have attempted to argue that marine transportation has likewise had its day.

Like all really good duds, this argument does not advance a simple falsehood, so much as fail to apply an important truth in a clear manner. As circumstances change, the solutions we use logically have to change as well. And since all change happens as a function of time, we easily gravitate to the use of time as a substitute for change. But an argument based on nothing but time, such as referring to a technology as "nineteenth century", with the actual changes that have taken place since the nineteenth century unmentioned, qualifies as a dud. Arguments against relying on bicycles for transport may exist, although I have yet to read any good ones, but the words "nineteenth century" do not, in any sense, qualify. The same holds for marine transportation, and many other technologies and customs. The changes that time brings may indeed create good arguments for doing (or not doing) things in a certain way. The passage of time itself does not.

A disturbing juxtaposition

• A motorist beats a cyclist so badly the cyclist loses a tooth. A passing class catches the incident on video. A judge acquits the motorist, on the ground that the cyclist impeded the motorist's "right of way", and the motorist feared the cyclist might "assault" his car.
• David Chen, a shopkeeper in Kensington market apprehends a serial thief who has, earlier that day, stolen sixty dollars (almost a day's wages for one employee) worth of merchandise. The crown charges him with assault, forcible confinement, and kidnapping.

These two decisions seem troublesomely inconsistent. Our society might decide that citizens must never use force against one another under any circumstances; that even a shopkeeper, working on thin margins, may not use force against thieves who torment him. But in that case, a motorist would never have the right to use force in the case of a minor traffic dispute.

Alternatively, we could decide to allow citizens to use "reasonable force" to defend their right of way and their vehicles. But if a motorist has a right to beat a person merely out of a concern that this person may dent his car, surely a storekeeper has the right to use force against a person who has actually stolen from him.

The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms speaks of not bringing the administration of justice into disrepute. But those who administer justice have to do more than simply avoid dishonesty; they have to follow a consistent set of rules. They have to give those of us whom the system purports to protect reason to believe that if we act in good faith, and follow the law as the courts have interpreted it, we can expect the police and the courts to uphold our rights, whether we suffer an assault or stand accused of one. If the courts, meaning judges, crown attorneys, and the police, do not follow consistent principles, then people will simply stop relying on them.

November 11

To begin at the beginning: Basil Launcelot Cumpston, my great uncle, fatally wounded near Bullecourt, 1917; John Cox, my cousin, died in when his Dakota went down in Myanmar, 1945. George Weber and Tom Fox, CPT colleagues, died in Iraq, 2003 and 2006. Andrew Olmsted, a US Army major and a web log author I admired, died Iraq 2008. Relatives, colleagues and friends who have sacrificed their lives for a better world link all of us to war, and we have come around, once again, to the day of the year which we set aside to remember them.

The hardest part of remembering is reconciling our debt to the men and women who died with our determination to avoid sending our own children to die in the future. I and millions of others can say of our relatives who gave their lives in the Allied Cause during the Second World War, that they died in a noble cause. But then we come face to face with an uncomfortable truth: good men and women only die in noble causes because bad men find it easy to trick or force people to kill, and die, for bad causes. If so many men had not followed Adolf Hitler and Hideki Tōjō, millions of men and women would not have had to go off to war. And facing that truth, too, we confront another: advancing the noble cause Allied soldiers, sailors and aviators fought and died for required years of struggle that went on years after the war and well beyond the borders of Germany or Japan. The militarism of Imperial Japan or the genocidal fury of National Socialism were only extreme cases of racist ideologies that stained all Western societies. Denazification did not only happen in Berlin and Nuremberg; Martin Luther King's march on Selma, decolonization in Africa and Asia, First Nations struggles in Canada, all formed an essential part of the process which, we can hope, will prevent genocidal fascism from ever rising again.

The clash of arms only begins the process of building a better world. If we carry on most of the work without violence, we must still commit to it, give our all, and accept the reality that humanity will never move forward without struggle and sacrifice. And so today we will remember those who struggled and laid down their lives, whether with guns or with empty hands. And we too will pick up the task they laid down, and do our best to carry forward the work of building a better world.