Church of Science-Fiction

January 30, 2012 By vorjack 11 Comments

I found this review of Hugh Urban’s The Church of Scientology to be very interesting. Urban seems to be a qualified analyst of minority religions and esoteric traditions, with previous works on Tantra and American esoteric traditions in India and America. He also seems to have some works on the political uses of fundamentalism in America which I should probably check out.

The whole review was interesting, but this passage stood out to me:

Hubbard had frequently compared life to a game, and he didn’t want to be ‘playing some minor game in Scientology. It isn’t cute or something to do for lack of something better.’ The game hinged on the idea that we can choose what we perceive to be ‘true’, and discard everything else as an illusion. Yet soon Hubbard’s postmodern religion strove to become a ‘real’ one. His followers – among them hippies as well as educated and ambitious young people – surprised him with the intensity of their belief. Hubbard told a group of doctoral students in Philadelphia in 1954 that his followers were more convinced of Scientology’s cosmology than he was. ‘I’m just kidding you mostly,’ he said. ‘I don’t believe any of these things and I don’t want to be agreed with about them … All I’m asking is that we take a look at this information, and … let’s see if we can’t disagree with this universe, just a little bit.’

That’s a very different way of looking at Hubbard than I’m used to, and that quote is very telling. I’m used to seeing Hubbard and his followers as either scammers, lunatics or dupes. But if you are (for lack of a better word) postmodern enough to believe that you can create your own reality, then what better way to shape this new reality than by creating a religion?

And this might go some way towards explaining why so many of Scientology’s most prominent followers are actors or authors. These are people who work at creating a new reality for their audience.

Filed Under: Books, Cults 11 Comments

Atheist Temple

January 27, 2012 By Daniel Florien 19 Comments

New library in Stuttgart © DieterJL

Filed Under: Atheism, Books 19 Comments

Goodbye, Anne McCaffrery

November 23, 2011 By vorjack 4 Comments

Anne McCaffrey, the science fiction author, died yesterday at the age of 85. From io9:

Anne McCaffrey wasn’t just the inventor of Pern, the world where a whole society is based on dragon-riding. She was also an incredibly influential author who helped transform the way science fiction and fantasy authors wrote about women, and the way all of us thought about bodies and selfhood. She was the first woman to win a Hugo Award and a Nebula Award, as well as a Grand Master of science fiction.

Besides the Pern books, McCaffrey wrote the classic space-faring novel The Ship Who Sang, in which a severely disabled girl becomes the core of a starship, or Brainship, with her mind controlling all its major functions. McCaffrey’s novel provided a startling new way to think about personhood and the nature of the mind/body connection, but also helped pave the way for a whole subgenre of posthuman space opera, in which heavily modified humans explore space.

During high school, I consumed everything that McCaffrey wrote: Pern, The Ship Who …, the Pegasus books and the Rowan series, all of them. She’s one of the few authors that I read during high school that still seems to hold up in later readings.

Filed Under: Books 4 Comments

America’s Twilight Belt

November 21, 2011 By vorjack 29 Comments

This image, created by Gallup Polls, shows which states in the US were the most religious in 2008. The results come from a poll where participants were asked if religion was an important part of their everyday life.

You can see America’s “Bible Belt” fairly clearly: the south eastern states are the most religious, with a swath going up the middle.

This image comes from Goodreads.com, and shows which states liked the Twilight series. The red states are where readers rated it highly, blue states lower.

The Bible belt is remarkably similar to the Twilight belt. This means something. I have no idea what.

Filed Under: Books 29 Comments

O’Reilly Flunks History

November 18, 2011 By vorjack 13 Comments

I don’t follow Bill O’Reilly, so I don’t know what possessed him to write a history of the Lincoln assassination. I could have predicted that it would be bad. Making a real contribution to the scholarship on a topic that has already been extensively covered is not an easy task. It would require a tremendous amount of time and effort in order to master the available primary sources and take into account all the existing theories. Even if he had the will to do so, I doubt that O’Reilly has the time he would need to tackle all of this.

No big surprise then that O’Reilly’s Killing Lincoln, which he co-wrote with Martin Dugard, has been a critical flop. For starters, O’Reilly wasn’t doing original research. According to a review at the Washington Post, the book doesn’t directly cite its sources, and seems to have come entirely from secondary works. So that’s how O’Reilly and Dugard avoided the lengthy stages of research, they synthesised the works of previous historians.

That’s not a killing flaw – or even a flaw at all if you admit that’s what you’re doing. Since O’Reilly is apparently doing commemorative “great man” history, he can probably get away with it. It doesn’t require much original research at this point to extol the virtues of Lincoln; there are libraries of books doing that already.

What has killed the book are the mistakes. There are tons of little mistakes, like incorrect measurements and confusion about dates. These could be slips of the pen, but they’re not encouraging. Jason Colavito sees them as the result of the poor state of editing in modern publishing. He’d know better than I, but I still suspect that O’Reilly has protection from editors. [Warning: TvTropes link]

There are tons of moderate mistakes, like mentioning the Oval Office, which did not exist yet. Here there really is no excuse, and yet it doesn’t seem to be a case of bias. Just pure sloppiness.

What is more disturbing is that O’Reilly has resurrected some old myths. The authors suggest that Lincoln’s Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, was somehow involved in the assassination. They acknowledge that there is no concrete evidence for this, but insist that “circumstantially, he was involved,” a nice little hand-wave that allows them to assert without proof.

There are also some weird ideas that don’t seem to be grounded in anything. Every great man needs a villain, so the authors enlist Lincoln’s successor, President Andrew Johnson. Now, Johnson was in many ways an embarrassment, but O’Reilly apparently wants the long time Democratic stump speaker to be a fire-breather hostile to the south. Would that it were so, but Johnson was far more lenient towards the south, and far less interested in black equality, than the Radical Republicans.

Again, I don’t know what possessed O’Reilly to set himself up for this. It doesn’t seem to be a partisan work, just a bad one.

Filed Under: Books, History 13 Comments
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