The Questioning Christian

Eight reasons for a rationalist to follow Jesus

In a long discussion thread on TitusOneNine, a commenter, the Rev. Kevin Maney, asked me (cordially): Why would you want to follow a dead guy?   Here's an edited version of my response.

I try to “follow Jesus” for two main reasons: 

1. Jesus stressed the Summary of the Law: I’m persuaded that the Summary of the Law, which Jesus emphasized, touches on something fundamental in the fabric of the universe, at the heart of the processes by which the creation continues. Specifically, we seem to do our best in life — both individually and as a species, both in passing on our genes to future generations and in serving as God's created co-creators:

• when we put God first — more concretely, when we face the facts of the reality that he wrought, and when we rejoice in, or at least acknowledge, the goodness of that reality; and
• when we seek the best for others as for ourselves.

2. Jesus was faithful, even unto death, to what he believed to be his duty. For whatever reason(s) — growing up in the military, my own military service, whatever — that kind of faithfulness is a huge hot button for me. 

These are the two main reasons why in an earlier posting I called Jesus a heroic prophet, someone eminently worthy of admiration and emulation.  Off the top of my head, I can think of several other qualities about him to admire and emulate:

3. Jesus was personally kind. I’m going to assume readers can “take judicial notice” of this without my having to cite chapter and verse.

4. He was willing to admit that he didn’t know everything, viz., the day or the hour when the Son of Man would come in the clouds with great power and glory [Mk 13.31-32].

5. He believed in facing facts. When the imprisoned John the Baptist sent emissaries to ask Jesus, are you the one who is to come?, Jesus responded, look around you, and draw your own conclusions: "the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them" [Matt 11.5]. When predicting the return of the Son of Man [Mk 13], he urged his listeners, pay attention to what you see happening around you!

6. He was willing to change his mind, to be persuaded by other points of view, viz., that of the Syrophoenician woman whose daughter was cured even though she was not an Israelite [Mk 7.24-30].

7. He was willing to “tell it like it is,” another matter for judicial notice.

8. He was personally courageous, physically confronting the moneychangers in the temple, and seemingly not being rattled by the crowds that wanted to kill him.

On reflection, it probably would be fair to characterize what I do as seeking, not to follow Jesus as Jesus, but to conduct my life in accordance with the principles and values that he emphasized and exemplified. 

Phrasing it another way, I put Jesus in roughly the same hero category as the late Dr. Michael DeBakey, who died a few days ago — except that:

• Jesus’ impact on the world has so far been several orders of magnitude greater than that of Dr. DeBakey;
• so far, none of Dr. DeBakey’s later followers have taken it upon themselves to persecute and even kill those who disagreed with them.

Granted, arguably this view of Jesus is scarcely any different than wanting to “be like Mike” [Michael Jordan]. But I don’t see a problem with that.

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Related posts:

• A response to an inquiring non-believer
• Why I still call myself a Christian and an Episcopalian

In Japan, Buddhism may be dying - NY Times

Christianity in Western Europe isn't the only faith experiencing a net membership decline due to apathy and death:  The NY Times reports that Buddhism in Japan is likewise fading away.

Over-exalting Scripture is a blasphemy against the Holy Spirit

Thoughtful Christians must reject teachings by some in the church that exalt Scripture to the point of making an idol of its various writings. That goes, for example, for the scriptural writings about sexuality, which are in the limelight again with the opening of the Lambeth Conference.

The various scriptural writings might indeed have been God-inspired.* They can indeed be useful for teaching, correction, etc. (see 1 Tim. 3.16).   And for the sake of argument, let's assume that those writings were a complete and totally-undistorted presentation of what God had to say to us at the time.

We can't rule out that God might have something different to say to us now, at a later stage in our development as a species. When my son was younger, he would sometimes ask if he could have a glass of wine with dinner. My response was no. Now that he’s an adult, when he's home from college I’m the one who offers him a glass. 

For all we know, God might well be doing something similar. Anyone who presumes to claim otherwise with (false) certainty would seem to be setting himself above God.

Time and change were created by God as much as anything else.  Given the dramatic changes of the past 2,000 years, it's certainly conceivable that God might have different instructions for us now than he did back then.

It's breathtaking that some traditionalists seem to think otherwise — that God had exactly one chance to say everything he was ever going to have to say to us, and therefore what he caused to be said in Scripture was “it,” once and for all. 

They blaspheme against the Holy Spirit who deny even the possibility that God might say something different to us now.  It might happen to be true that God would never change what he putatively said before. But categorically declaring that to be the case is way, WAY above our pay grade.

Paul had the right advice in 1 Thess. 5.20-21:  Don’t despise those who claim to be inspired by the Spirit — test everything, and keep that which proves to be good.

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* There's no reason reason to assume Scripture was any more God-inspired than, say, Newton’s Principia or Einstein’s special- and general-relativity papers. If anything, Newton's and Einstein's writings arguably had an additional divine credential: they weren't merely creatures of their authors' creativity, they were testable against the actual reality that God wrought (cf. Deut. 18.20-22).

Refusal to flip-flop might be the sin against the Holy Spirit

Over dinner last night, my wife and I agreed it's unfortunate that political candidates get excoriated for changing their minds: if they don't cling rigidly to whatever position they happened to take in the past, they're accused of flip-flopping.

I ventured that someone who categorically refuses to change his mind, even when new evidence or new insights are revealed to him, might well be guilty of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, the sin that Jesus said would not be forgiven (Mk 3.22-30; Mt 12.31-32).

And it won't be forgiven, I speculated, precisely because it's an ongoing sin, meaning that at the time in question, there's no repentance.

I did a quick Google search, and wasn't surprised to find that others, including Augustine, have expressed somewhat similar views.

Mixing religious and legal blogging - not for me

This afternoon I heard from a friend and former law-firm colleague who has hung out a shingle and is building a Web site for his new practice. He said he was going to follow the lead of Rice University professor Jim Turner and include a statement of his faith on his professional site.

I had previously toyed with the idea of having one, consolidated blog. But I concluded that I wouldn't be comfortable mixing my religious- and professional writing.  Few of my religious readers would be interested in my legal writing, and on my legal blog (100 Feet Up), I figure I owe it to those readers to keep my religious opinions to myself; if they’re interested in my religious views, they’ll find their way here via cross-reference links, as my friend did

It's like a restaurant chef whose guests do him the honor of visiting his place of business (as opposed, say, to being his house guests). We expect the chef at work to offer opinions about cuisine; that's part of why we came. But unless the chef is aiming to establish a cult of personality, my guess is that most diners would probably prefer that he do them the courtesy of remaining silent on sensitive non-cuisine subjects like religion.  (Unless asked, of course.) 

I'm uncomfortable with mixing religious- and professional writing for another reason.  Religious beliefs are unavoidably conjectural and non-verifiable. It therefore seems just a bit detrimental to a pluralistic society for the host of a professional-type Web site, who holds himself out as an authority on "factual" matters like science and law, to post a personal faith statement on the site.  The better practice, I would submit, would be not to do so.

This is just my personal opinion; reasonable minds can surely differ on this point.

The faith once delivered never actually existed

Go read "Rescuing the faith once delivered to all the saints," written by an unnamed friend of Katie Sherrod (a leader of the loyalist faction in the secessionist Diocese of Fort Worth) and posted on her blog. The piece marvelously demonstrates how, when traditionalists bemoan the abandonment of the faith "believed by all people in all places at all times," they're indulging in wishful thinking and even in willful self-delusion.

The piece sketches the main theological parties of the early church, whose various doctrines were often mutually exclusive:

• Primitive Jerusalem Christianity:  "... the final age has begun ... history will close upon [Jesus'] imminent return; ... Jesus seen more as messiah than divine being ...."

• Primitive gentile Christianity: "the concept of messiah means nothing; ... Jesus the son of God came to earth, died, was resurrected and restored, is now Lord and present to his worshippers ...."

• Pauline Christianity: "... life in Christ produces what the law cannot but with few hard and fast ethical rules; love, not law: little interest in Jesus’ life, emphasis on him as Second Adam ...."

• Johannine Christianity: "Jesus’ life [was] secondary to his relation to the Father and the divine nature of Christ ...."

• Jewish Christianity: "... a continuation of Judaism, Jesus is messiah in succession to the prophets, not divine, not virgin born, will be Messiah/Son of Man at return; ... an ethnic religion; they loathed Paul."

• Gnostic Christianity: "gnosticism antedates Christianity, has roots all over the place and a vast literature ...."

The piece also recaps how, around 300 years after Jesus' death, the Emperor Constantine knocked heads in the church leadership, provoking the production of the Nicene Creed as a brokered compromise:

[Constantine] gave the various church parties an ultimatum: clean up your act and give me a church that knows what it believes, an instrument of unity and centralization instead of the morass of claim and counter-claim and diversity and uncertainty I see now.

So the church did what it always does: it held conventions—or councils or synods as they called them—meetings where people met and argued and voted. [Extra paragraphing added.]

Read it all.

Stop punishing impermissibly positive thoughts - Gregg Easterbrook

Gregg Easterbrook has a very sensible piece in Friday's Wall Street Journal that's worth a read.  He criticizes political campaigns and the news media for "seek[ing] to punish impermissibly positive thoughts," and points out that there are "two realities of life in the United States today:  The way we are, and the way we think we are. The way we are could use some work, but overall, is pretty good. The way we think we are is terrible, horrible, awful. Possibly worse."  Gregg Easterbrook, Life is Good, So Why Do We Feel So Bad?, Wall Street Journal, June 13, 2008, p. A15 (emphasis added.)

The evolution of social skills may be what has advanced humans over lower primates

A recent study suggests that what sets us humans apart from our chimpanzee- and orangutan "cousins" might not be any difference in intelligence (which doesn't seem to be especially pronounced).  Instead, the crucial difference may be the ability we have evolved to empathize with and to learn from each other, in ways that lower primates don't seem to be capable of.

Human beings have evolved to coordinate complex activities, to gossip and to playact together. It is because they are adapted for such cultural activities — and not because of their cleverness as individuals — that human beings are able to do so many exceptionally complex and impressive things.

Of course, humans beings are not cooperating angels; they also put their heads together to do all kinds of heinous deeds. But such deeds are not usually done to those inside “the group.”

Recent evolutionary models have demonstrated what politicians have long known: the best way to get people to collaborate and to think like a group is to identify an enemy and charge that “they” threaten “us.”

The remarkable human capacity for cooperation thus seems to have evolved mainly for interactions within the group. Such group-mindedness is a major cause of strife and suffering in the world today.

The solution — more easily said than done — is to find new ways to define the group.

Michael Tomasello, How Are Humans Unique?, NY Times, May 25, 2008 (extra paragraphing added).

If this aspect of human evolution has been part of an ongoing continuing creation, it's pretty damned clever of the Creator, wouldn't you say?

Nirvana may be a right-brain phenomenon

"JILL BOLTE TAYLOR was a neuroscientist working at Harvard’s brain research center when she experienced nirvana. [¶] But she did it by having a stroke."

Read the rest.  [UPDATE: See also the video of her TED talk is here (thanks to commenter 'RedLefty').]

At first I thought this was a GOP campaign commercial

Watch it.  (Hat tip: TitusOneNine.)

Obama and Florida Jews: Still more proof (as if we needed it) that we humans regularly get it wrong

The presidential campaign is giving us fresh evidence that we humans tend to get our facts wrong, for example when under the influence of anxiety. (Regular readers know this human tendency has strongly influenced my view of some of the stories told in Scripture, especially in the New Testament.) Here's an excerpt from a NY Times story this week about Obama and the Florida Jewish community: 

Among many older Jews, and some younger ones, as well, he has become a conduit for Jewish anxiety about Israel, Iran, anti-Semitism and race.

Mr. Obama is Arab, Jack Sterns friends told him in Aventura. (He's not.)

He is a part of Chicago's large Palestinian community, suspects Mindy Chotiner of Delray. (Wrong again.)

Mr. Wright is the godfather of Mr. Obama's children, asserted Violet Darling in Boca Raton. (No, he's not.)

Al Qaeda is backing him, said Helena Lefkowicz of Fort Lauderdale (Incorrect.)

Michelle Obama has proven so hostile and argumentative that the campaign is keeping her silent, said Joyce Rozen of Pompano Beach. (Mrs. Obama campaigns frequently, drawing crowds in her own right.)

Mr. Obama might fill his administration with followers of Louis Farrakhan, worried Sherry Ziegler. (Extremely unlikely, given his denunciation of Mr. Farrakhan.)

Jodi Kantor, As Obama Heads to Florida, Many of Its Jews Have Doubts, NY Times, May 22, 2008

Your gold jewelry came from a supernova explosion

A powerful event in my faith journey was when I began to grasp how creation has been an ongoing process. It's exemplified by the way a supernova explosion — which has to be about the best example there is of complete and utter destruction — manufactures the elements (literally) of new planets and of life here on earth. As one astronomer told a New York Times reporter, "If you're wearing gold jewelry, it came from a supernova explosion." See Dennis Overbye, Scientists See Supernova in Action - New York Times, May 22, 2008.

Send in the Latrines - New York Times

If you want to appreciate how much progress the human race has made in the First World — but also how much work there still is to do elsewhere — consider Rose George's op-ed piece in today's Times, about the danger posed by the lack of sanitary facilities in "Myanmar" after the recent Cyclone Nargis:

... Food, shelter and clean water are what aid agencies emphasize. But human excrement is a weapon of mass destruction. A gram of human feces can contain up to 10 million viruses. At least 50 communicable diseases — including cholera, meningitis and typhoid — travel from host to host in human excrement. It doesn’t take much: a small child, maybe, who plays in soil where people have been defecating, then dips his fingers in the family rice pot. The aftermath of a disaster like Cyclone Nargis — with masses of weakened people on the move — is a communicable disease paradise. ... ¶ ...

In poor countries, diarrhea is the reason you find malnourished children in well-fed families. It's why millions of girls drop out of school, and why millions of dollars' worth of productivity is lost from workers sick with this week's bout of dysentery.

Good disposal of human excreta can reduce diarrhea by 40 percent. Washing hands reduces it still further. Health economists reckon that every dollar invested in sanitation can save $7 on health costs and lost productivity. No wonder the readers of The British Medical Journal last year voted sanitation the greatest medical milestone ever, over penicillin and anesthesia.

Send in the Latrines - New York Times, May 19, 2008 (emphasis and extra paragraphing added).

Jesus' mission was a bust - at least if that mission was what the church has long claimed

Over at TitusOneNine, commenter Jody+ asked me "what [my] understanding of soteriology is if it doesn’t include Jesus’ victory through the Cross and resurrection.  And Tory asked whether I believed that Jesus’ mission was a failure, "since Romans continued to run roughshod over Israel and other occupied peoples?  What kind of salvation did Jesus accomplish, if at all, for it certainly was not geo-political?”

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If Jesus thought of his mission as that of liberating Israel from worldly oppression and ushering in God’s reign:  then yes, that mission was an utter, abject, desperate, and miserable failure. To refuse to face that fact is to live in a fantasy world.

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If Jesus thought of his mission as that of winning victory over sin and death, and bringing eternal life to all who believed in him:  we have just about as much reliable evidence that he succeeded, even partially, as we do that the Heaven’s Gates suicides succeeded in joining the hidden spaceship that they believed was coming for them. 

Intellectual honesty requires us to admit that while we can hope, we simply don’t know, what happens after we die.  To claim otherwise is, again, to live in a fantasy world.

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What we can say with some confidence is that what Jesus characterized as the way to eternal life — the Summary of the Law — seems to touch on something fundamental in the fabric of the universe:

• The evidence for the existence of a Creator is pretty compelling, certainly more so than the evidence against;

• History suggests that, in the words of Lutheran theologian Philip Hefner, we seem to be “created co-creators,” participating unwittingly in a titanic process that has been gradually, and often painfully, creating order out of the chaos of the Big Bang;

• On balance, over the long term, those who seem to contribute the most to this process of creation — and who seem most likely to survive, reproduce, and pass their genes and memes on, not just to their children but to their grandchildren — are those who face the facts of the reality wrought by the Creator, including the fact of our human fallibility.  Who don’t insist that the world must be a certain way merely because they imagine it to be so.  Who seek the best for others as they do for themselves.  In short, who seek (whether they know it or not) to follow the Summary of the Law.

For all we know, when we die, the Creator will simply discard us his tools, the way we would throw away a worn-out drill bit. But it’s not totally implausible to conjecture that it won’t happen that way.  It’s not irrational to hope, and trust, that we’ll get to share, somehow, in the end result of whatever unimaginably-wonderful project the Creator has been up to.

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Returning again to whether Jesus’ mission was a failure:  If Jesus thought of his mission as being to inspire all people to organize their lives around the Summary of the Law, he didn’t completely succeed on his own.  But the church he catalyzed hasn’t done an altogether terrible job of continuing the mission.

If we would stop insisting that everyone believe traditionalist soteriology, christology, and theology, and return to simply preaching the Summary of the Law, we likely would have much more success in reaching nonbelievers and doubters with Jesus’ message.

Is Jim Webb maneuvering to get Obama's VP nod?

Virginia Senator Jim Webb sure seems to be maneuvering to be picked as Barack Obama's vice-presidential running mate:

• The cover story in today's Parade Magazine is an excerpt from Webb's latest book, A Time To Fight: Reclaiming a Fair and Just America. Judging from the excerpts and reviews, this is a classic — and remarkably well-timed — example of a political statement, of the sort written with an upcoming campaign in mind.
• This past Friday, Webb plugged his book on National Public Radio's All Things Considered. He's scheduled for more interviews on Letterman and elsewhere next week.

Webb would clearly bring some strengths to the Democratic ticket:

• In some respects, Webb is a younger version of John McCain.  He served heroically in Vietnam, was badly wounded in combat, and was medically retired from the Marine Corps as a result. There's little room for doubt that many conservative- to moderate independents would view him favorably.
• Webb has a track record of acting as a political independent, sometimes pugnaciously so. He resigned from his position as Ronald Reagan's Secretary of the Navy because of policy disagreements.  In Virginia's 2006 election he switched parties; beating long odds, he captured the Democratic senatorial nomination and went on to unseat long-time GOP incumbent George Allen. At a White House welcoming reception, Webb minced no words with President Bush (to the point of being insulting if you ask me); say what you will about Webb's manners, this year seems to be one in which his kind of blunt, maverick independence might be appealing to some of the electorate.
• Webb's home state of Virginia has long been reliably Republican in presidential elections, but some polls suggest that this year its 13 Electoral College delegates could be up for grabs. The opportunity to put a popular Virginian on the ticket would certainly be of interest to the Democrats.

I'd love to know what's been going on behind the scenes, and how much (if at all) the Obama camp has been involved in Webb's conveniently-timed book promotions.

High-performing graduates may make better teachers

From Teach for America - New York Times:

... a new study from a federal research center based at the Urban Institute in Washington suggests that the country might raise student performance through programs like Teach for America, a nonprofit group that places high-achieving college graduates in schools that are hard to staff. ... ¶ ...

... The results suggest that states that want students to do better in math and science need to focus recruitment on more selective colleges instead of on traditional teacher education programs, which are often little more than diploma mills.

Immigrant assimilation: Watch the trend, not just the snapshot

From Jason Riley, Keep the Immigrants, Deport the Multiculturalists - WSJ.com (May 15, 2008, p. A17):

... Dowell Myers, a demographer at the University of Southern California, calls it the "Peter Pan Fallacy." "Many of us assume, unwittingly, that immigrants are like Peter Pan," says Mr. Myers, "forever frozen in their status as newcomers, never aging, never advancing economically, and never assimilating." * * *

With respect to linguistic assimilation, which is one of the more important measures because it amounts to a job skill that can increase earnings, the historical pattern is as follows: The first generation learns enough English to get by but prefers the mother tongue. The children of immigrants born here grow up in homes where they understand the mother tongue to some extent and may speak it, but they prefer English. When those children become adults, they establish homes where English is the dominant language.

There's every indication that Latinos are following this pattern.

John McCain and Jesus

From Steven Waldman, Political Perceptions : The Religification of John McCain, in today's WSJ Online:

In the past, Sen. McCain has tended to emphasize a sense of duty as the key to his survival in Vietnam. "Glory belongs to the act of being constant to something greater than yourself, to a cause, to your principles, to the people on whom you rely, and who rely on you in return," he wrote. "A filthy, crippled, broken man, all I had left of my dignity was the faith of my fathers. It was enough."

(Emphasis added.) 

That pretty much sums up what I admire (and would hope to imitate) about Jesus of Nazareth.

Science undermines orthodoxy, not religion itself

"The cognitive revolution is not going to end up undermining faith in God, it’s going end up challenging faith in the Bible." 

- David Brooks, The Neural Buddhists, NY Times, May 13, 2008.

Heresy is necessary in an ever-changing world

Dr. Stanley Aronson, dean of medicine emeritus at Brown University, points out that the world changes; that we don't know everything; and therefore all beliefs must be open to reexamination, so that we can determine which ones remain serviceable: 

[In a purely-imaginary idyllic world, b]eliefs are determined solely by consensus, by common sense and the evidence provided by one’s immediate senses. It is universally believed in this serene world that the sun rotates around the earth, that the major religious texts are inerrant, that professional athletes employ steroids only for post-retirement arthritis and that the moon is composed of Camembert cheese. ...  [In this world, e]motional peace becomes more important than anxiety or the corrosive knowledge of how little is known. Skepticism and curiosity become alien emotions.

The future, in such a pacific environment, would never be feared since the world will remain unchanged. Tomorrow, and all of the days that follow will be the same blissful Eden as yesterday or today. Ugliness, discord, contentiousness — and heresy — would remain as alien experiences confined to story books. And only the looming shadow of utter boredom would threaten this prospect of tranquility.

But imagine now, in this placid community, some rebellious individual, someone with the temerity to question the accepted beliefs of the majority, a person eager to assert that the ultimate enemy is not discord but ingrained bigotry and willful ignorance. The elders of this hypothetical community might initially condemn such a heretic, perhaps even destroy his spirit, but in their hearts they will know that all things but death change; that all beliefs must be tested continuously to determine which are false and which worthy and that it is the occasional heretic — with his provoking postulates — and not the peace-lover who brings progress and understanding to the community.

Read it all. (Hat tip: TitusOneNine; all emphasis added.)

Call your mother - Thomas L. Friedman

From Thomas L. Friedman, Call Your Mother - New York Times:

Whenever I’ve had the honor of giving a college graduation speech, I always try to end it with this story about the legendary University of Alabama football coach, Bear Bryant. Late in his career, after his mother had died, South Central Bell Telephone Company asked Bear Bryant to do a TV commercial. As best I can piece together, the commercial was supposed to be very simple — just a little music and Coach Bryant saying in his tough voice: “Have you called your mama today?”

On the day of the filming, though, he decided to ad-lib something. He reportedly looked into the camera and said: “Have you called your mama today? I sure wish I could call mine.” That was how the commercial ran, and it got a huge response from audiences.

So on this Mother’s Day, if you take one thing away from this column, take this: Call your mother.

Immigration is our secret weapon - Josef Joffe

"China, Japan and Europe are aging rapidly; the United States will remain a young country way into the 21st century. And why? Immigration is 'America’s secret weapon.'  ... “First rich, then fat and lazy” will not be America’s fate. * * * America will be in trouble only when China becomes home to tomorrow’s hungry masses yearning to be free — and to make it." 

— Josef Joffe, reviewing “The Post-American World,” by Fareed Zakaria,

America sorts itself out geographically into blue- and red zones

From William A. Galston & Pietro S. Nivola, "Vote Like Thy Neighbor," NY Times, May 11, 2008 (bold-faced emphasis added):

... during the past two decades, many whites have moved to one group of cities and many blacks to another. Meanwhile, young people have deserted rural and older manufacturing areas for cities like Austin and Portland. Places with higher densities of college graduates attract even more, so that the gap between such communities and less-educated areas widens further. Zones of high education, in turn, produce more innovation and enjoy higher incomes, generating communities dominated by upper-middle-class tastes. Lower-educated regions, by contrast, tend to be more family-oriented and more faithful to traditional authority.

Not surprisingly, this demographic sorting correlates with a widening difference in political preferences. What’s more, according to Bishop and Cushing, once a tipping point is reached, majorities tend to become supermajorities. This is consistent with the findings of recent political science and social psychology: individuals in the minority of their group tend to shift their views toward the majority, while members of the majority become more extreme in their views. In such circumstances, discussions within groups often intensify, rather than moderate, the underlying polarization.

Our brains can deceive us, even about wine

From Eric Asimov, "Wine’s Pleasures: Are They All in Your Head?" NY Times, May 7, 2008:

But assuming for the moment that it’s true that most drinkers prefer the cheap stuff, why does anyone bother buying $55 cabernet? One answer is provided by a second experiment, in which presumably sober researchers at the California Institute of Technology and the Stanford Business School demonstrated that the more expensive consumers think a wine is, the more pleasure they are apt to take in it.

The researchers scanned the brains of 21 volunteer wine novices as they administered tiny tastes of wine, measuring sensations in the medial orbitofrontal cortex, the part of the brain where flavor responses apparently register. The subjects were told only the price of the wines. Without their knowledge, they tasted one wine twice, and were given two different prices for that wine. Invariably they preferred the one they thought was more expensive.

Being smart can be bad for your health - NY Times

From Carl Zimmer, Lots of Animals Learn, but Smarter Isn’t Better, NY Times, May 6, 2008:

Dr. Kawecki and like-minded scientists are trying to figure out why animals learn and why some have evolved to be better at learning than others.  One reason for the difference, their research finds, is that being smart can be bad for an animal’s health.

* * *

The benefits of learning must have been enormous for evolution to have overcome those costs, Dr. Kawecki argues. For many animals, learning mainly offers a benefit in finding food or a mate. But humans also live in complex societies where learning has benefits, as well.

Read it all.