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Apologia Report 15:22 (1,027)
June 17, 2010
Subject: The surprising moral life of ... babies
In this issue:
ETHICS - bursting long-held scientific theory, researchers acknowledge that, yes, even infants know right from wrong
+ book-length sociological report: blasting "exaggerations of
evangelical shortcomings," or just preaching to the choir?
+ Hugh Hefner, "the most influential figure that American popular
culture has produced"
ORIGINS - Richard Dawkins, tripping over his own words?
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ETHICS
"Six-Month-Old Babies Can Tell Right From Wrong" by Heidi Blake -- reports that "Researchers asked infants of various ages to choose between characters which they had seen behaving well or badly, and found they overwhelmingly favoured the 'good' characters." It is understood that this discovery "contradicts the belief promoted by psychologists such as Sigmund Freud that babies are born 'amoral animals' and acquire a sense of right and wrong through conditioning." Yale University psychology professor Paul Bloom concludes that "A growing body of evidence ... suggests that humans do have a rudimentary moral sense from the very start of life. ...
"Some sense of good and evil seems to be bred in the bone." The Telegraph (UK), May 9 '10, <www.tinyurl.com/2etzkq3>
See also "The Moral Life of Babies" (cover story) by Paul Bloom,
New York Times Magazine, May 3 '10, <www.tinyurl.com/2eqtx54>
Christians Are Hate-Filled Hypocrites ... and Other Lies You've Been Told: A Sociologist Shatters Myths from the Secular and Christian Media, by Bradley R. E. Wright [1] -- the brief review reads: "A sociologist at the University of Connecticut, Wright examines recent survey data on Christian evangelicals to see if they substantiate the often misguided and hyperbolic public perceptions of this faith group. Separating the wheat from the chaff, he explains how some poorly worded, ill-sampled statistics give the wrong impression of evangelicals and why people should avoid giving them credence. Though he often blames the media for gleefully reporting bad news about devout Christians, he doesn't spare evangelical polemicists such as Josh McDowell and Lee Strobel for their false exaggerations of evangelical shortcomings. His biggest target may be the pollster George Barna, whose surveys on Christianity have generated intense controversy. Wright's colloquial writing style gives this volume the feel of a folksy college lecture series. The abundant use of graphics adds to the impression the book's genesis was cribbed from introductory sociology of religion classes. The conclusions drawn here - no surprise - are that the most committed Christians practice what they preach, performing better than the rest of the population on a host of social measures including divorce, domestic violence, sexual misconduct, crime, substance abuse, and everyday honesty." Publishers Weekly, May 24 '10, n.p. <www.publishersweekly.com>
"The Playboy and His Western World" by Algis Valiuna -- the subtitle reads: "How Hugh Hefner - yes, Hugh Hefner - became the moral arbiter of our age." What is the chief goal of man? Why, "the promise of as much pleasure as a body can manage in a lifetime, all of it perfectly innocent, of course." And that has made Hefner "the most influential figure that American popular culture has produced.... Only in America can a man whose declared ambitions were to bed innumerable beautiful women and get rich in the process make a mark deeper than those left by great writers or leading thinkers or most presidents. ... Americans have always pursued happiness, usually without any clear idea of what they were after; Hefner demonstrated that it could be not only pursued but also captured, and he posted photographs of the quarry for proof. The sexual revolution, the defining uprising of our time, is his brainchild; others stand at his shoulder in the leadership, but he is the founding father of the orgasmic republic."
Hefner biographer Steven Watts, "professor of history at the
University of Missouri, has written a life so admiring of its
subject’s energy, intelligence, and innovation that one almost forgets that these were also Lucifer’s salient qualities." [2] We read that the key moment in Hefner's past was when he discovered that his "Grandpa was a pervert ["who at 61 was imprisoned for fondling 10-year-old girls" and consequently the young Hef] blamed the puritanical sexual tyranny that twisted good people into sad deformity. ...
"He had a delirious idea of how he wanted to live, of how he
thought everyone really wanted to live. Playboy was the natural
extension of that guiding idea." That magazine "debuted in December 1953, featuring nude photos of Marilyn Monroe. The first issue sold 70,000 copies" and its popularity grew for the next 20 years.
"Hefner wanted to restore the primal innocence of the two things
Americans had endowed with the glamour of wickedness: sex and money. ...
"He drew the line, however, at intelligent women; those, he said,
he didn’t know what to do with. ...
"Hefner’s signal achievement is in making not just pornography
respectable but also the grab-it-and-go sexuality it bespeaks. ...
[I]t is Playboy’s vanguard role in promoting sexual license as the
ethical norm, in touting promiscuity as the essence of urbane
distinction, that singles the magazine out. We all live in Hef’s world now." As evidence of this, Valiuna reports that "gonorrhea of the throat now rivals mononucleosis as a disease afflicting sophisticated adolescents.
"Meanwhile, television commercials flogging a pill for genital
herpes remind the viewer that one in five Americans has the disease, that it can be spread even when there are no eruptions, and that the treatment is not a cure. One in five offers the adventurer worse odds than Russian roulette. Still, the adventurer is grateful when an incurable venereal disease is usually only a nuisance. Everyone knows there is worse out there than herpes."
Hefner's "eminence soils us all. For what could be more trivial
than a life like his? And what can be sadder for the rest of us than
to aspire to live likewise? ...
"[O]ne must grant that Hefner’s war against pseudo-Puritanism has not been altogether a bad thing.
"There are those, mostly religious zealots, who make no concessions whatsoever to Hef’s world, but their numbers are ever punier and their long-term viability is dubious: these hard-line virtuecrats of necessity define themselves against an overwhelming force and conduct a hopeless rearguard action. Moderation is a surer precept just now than undying antipathy toward any easing of the old strictures. ...
"In the name of equality and freedom, and in the democratic belief that nothing human is alien to us, everything that can be done eventually will be done, loudly and vividly and in public, and
children will learn in school how admirable that is, and everyone will be expected to get used to it, or indeed to applaud. Decent people have an unprecedented degree of freedom, and want to keep it. There are many who are far from decent, however, and they too claim respectability and acceptance as their inalienable rights: in good time, the incestuous, the polygamists, the pedophiles, the animal lovers, will all insist on their day in court."
Valiuna concludes with his strongest example of publicly condoned depravity, a gay club scene described in a memoir enthusiastically reviewed by the New York Review of Books <nybooks.com> -- yet another example of "that irresistible idea of sexual pleasure as the ultimate good, an idea taken to its inevitable extreme.
"This is the very idea that Hugh Hefner launched with the promise of innocent ecstasies, underwritten by the surefire erotic magnetism of the lovely and wholesome girl next door." Commentary, May '10, pp32-35. <www.tinyurl.com/2fzh7zn>
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ORIGINS
Mark Albrecht -- a longtime AR subscriber and author of a classic
Christian response to reincarnation [3], recently pointed out
something to us that's worth going all the way back to last November. Here, while being interviewed, atheist Richard Dawkins opines that Charles Darwin "showed how you can get things which look overwhelmingly as though they’ve been designed.... They work in a detailed, complicated way, and he showed that the illusion of design - that immensely powerful illusion of design - can be put together by the blind forces of physics working through this very special mechanism called 'natural selection,' so that in the end, they almost precisely mimic what a designer might have produced." A.V. Club (The Onion), Nov 19 '09. <www.tinyurl.com/29wx9xg>
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SOURCES: Monographs
1 - Christians Are Hate-Filled Hypocrites ... and Other Lies You've
Been Told: A Sociologist Shatters Myths from the Secular and Christian Media, by Bradley R. E. Wright (Bethany Fellowship, Jul 1 '10, paperback, 256 pages) <www.tinyurl.com/29mrded>
2 - Mr Playboy: Hugh Hefner and the American Dream, by Steven Watts (Wiley, 2009, paperback, 544 pages) <www.tinyurl.com/27asmr4>
3 - Reincarnation, a Christian Appraisal, by Mark C. Albrecht (IVP, 1982, paperback, 132 pages) <www.tinyurl.com/2cavgtx>
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