I just finished read/listening to Karen Armstrong’s The Case for God, and like waking with memories of a vivid dream, I want to get my thoughts down before they get pushed aside by the concerns of the day.

In Bad Faith, part 8: The Case for God – Not What You Think

I think that Armstrong did such a great job summarizing the book in her NPR/Fresh Air interview that the book feels a bit ponderous. What I mean is that this is a book that one really needs to pay attention to and no play as background music (ack, stupid multitasking lifestyle). Armstrong takes the reader from the very beginning evidences of “god thoughts” found in the pre-historic caves of Lascaux, to the new-atheists like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, spending a goodly bit of time going through the Greek, Asian, and post-medieval schools of thought that may not be familiar to the reader.

So, as a former Loyola Marymount religious studies major with a B.A. in Biblical Studies from Biola University and several quarters of study at Fuller Seminary toward an MA in Theology and a piss-pour background in the Greek and Latin Classics (no ones fault but my own), I greatly appreciated Armstrong’s academic, non-polemic, recitation of pre-history and history of religion on this planet. Yeah, that’s the scope of this book. I’m very interested in her other books on Islam and Buddhism to see how deep she dives into these religions where I’m greatly lacking in my own understanding.

Thoughts that struck me as I listened to the book, mainly how every generation and every great thinker felt compelled to re-interpret God based on their own recent history, cultural and personal, and their own cultural problems. For example, how different would modern Christianity be if Augustine had not had such a problem with his pre-conversion sexual appetites, how would the relationship between God and man be cast differently if Augustine hadn’t promoted the idea of Original Sin and demonized sexuality in general, making it a sin except for the purpose of conception? What would have happened if Emperor Constantine had not chosen to use Christianity as a unify force in his divided empire, thus forcing provincial Christianity to agree on which books belonged in the scriptures, the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth and what would be orthodox and what would be heretical? How differently would history have been had Christianity remained a Jewish sect instead of a world political power? And every time there was a political or natural disaster there seemed to be gigantic shifts in thought with conservatives abandoning the silent God and liberal’s looking for a literal simplistic God to find comfort from.

The greatest error in our search for the Divine seems to be that all of us, skeptic and believer, have made the mistake of assuming that our understanding of religion and the Divine has always been the way we presently see things. Biblical inerrancy, literal divine intervention, God as a Being, the idea of One Truth, religion as belief system instead of daily practice, the after-life, rationalism versus belief: these are all tenets of faith that many of us hold onto believing that changing any one of them invalidates the whole idea of Faith. And yet, many of these ideas have a date in history when they caught on, thus showing that there was a time when people did not, for example, hold to the idea that there was only one truth or that the scriptures had to be perfect in every word and teaching. It might be surprising to some that there have been faithful Christians who do not believe that Jesus was God incarnate. I know, shock. In fact, not at all like the superstitious primitives who saw gods in every stone and stick, it may surprise some that some ancients understood that one could not reduce God to Person because God doesn’t make sense as someone like themselves only bigger.

So, are you tired of the literalistic infantile religion that you find on the TV day and night? Are you unconvinced that it’s NOT all DNA and chemical reactions? Are you tired of the petty divisive warring between small minded sects with guns? Well, then maybe it’s time, in the words of Neo, to free ones mind from narrow assumptions of ones cultural and personal past and entertain thoughts that it’s a much bigger universe than one can even understand, but that one is a part of this much bigger existence.

Also, it should go without saying that it’s long past time for fat self-absorbed Christians to get over themselves and express their beliefs beginning by welcoming a Muslim into their home and giving a good portion of their wealth away to the poor and shut the hell up until they’ve done the first things that their Messiah told them to do. Additionally, It’s past time for the faithful from all beliefs to stop letting the Fundamentalists misrepresent what the Founders of their Faith intended. Rest assured, when you kill, hate or persecute in the name of God, you aren’t speaking or acting for any god beyond your own personal sickness. And that goes for those of you who hate someone who doesn’t agree with your politics or, horror of horrors, doesn’t agree with your sexuality (or lack thereof). To use a phrase popular with a few friends, if the founders could, they’d bitch-slap these presumptive crazies. Oh wait, that’d just lend credence toward their belief in rewarding violence for violence. Oh what the hell, slap away!

god help us! Getting back to Armstrong’s book; Meaning and data, mythos and logos, it’s not a mistake that every culture has examples of this phenomenon. Funny, thinking of previous readings, it’s a bit like the left and right hemispheres of the human brain, we don’t do particularly well when only one hemisphere is “in charge.” The same would seem to be true of human cultures that advocate only one way of understanding reality, religion or secularism. As with the human mind, the two parts must communicate and influence each other or the whole will suffer and fail. Interesting. This business of God and religion is not at all what i would have at first thought.

Karen Armstrong at TED: The Golden Rule

Sources:
image: Karen Armstrong. http://shelleyadelle.wordpress.com/2009/03/26/belief-to-love-to-prize-to-hold-dear/ retrieved on 3/11/2010

image: Padre.jpg microsoft clipart

TED video: Karen Armstrong: Let’s revive the Golden Rule. http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/karen_armstrong_let_s_revive_the_golden_rule.html retrieved on 3/11/2010

        

Over the past few weeks I’ve been working with my Full Sail EMDT students teaching and learning more about online learning management systems. I’ve been using online tools for teaching and learning for over nine years and tech in my classrooms for over 15-years, so I generally don’t think twice about the role of tech in education. But what got me thinking was the depth and complexity of the tools we’ve been studying and the largely unrewarded efforts it will take for our students to get some of these systems rolling. It can be such an uphill battle just to get meaningful online access in the classroom. So I started thinking that some very basic questions needed to be considered in order for my students to be fully prepared to translate what we’re studying into something that they can use in the classroom. The following thoughts and videos were posted for my students to read before our weekly online meeting.

The Role of Technology in Education

As you work through this course’s reading assignments and create your Udutu project you might notice that you might be the only one among your peers working at such a high level of expectation as far as the integration and useage of technology in the day-to-day functioning of a classroom. Why is that? The normal excuse on the part of educators tends to be the lack of time and on the part of administration the lack of funds. And even when technology is brought into the classroom the purchasing process tends to be such a top-down "what do we need now" event, lacking any long-term vision or implementation plan that it’s no suprise that thirty-years after the arrival of the first small computers into the classroom, we’re still having this discussion.

One of the voices of dissent is astronomer Clifford Stoll, who feels that the last thing we need is to have students equate staring at a picture of the Louvre on a computer screen with anything remotely similar to experiencing the real thing. When Dr. Stoll wrote Silicon Snake Oil (1996) the Internet was in just in its commercial infancy, NetDay had 20,000 volunteers wiring local schools to the Internet and there was great buzz about improving education by improving access to the Information SuperHighway. At the time his concern was whether this investment in infrastructure could be better spent on teachers instead of tools. Over a dozen years later, with institutions flying to "online learning" as a way to cheaply expand programs without having to invest in more facilities or faculty, the question still remains whether sound pedagogy is even entering into these decisions.

The following videos look at the role of technology in education, but not in such a "either/or" point of view. The first video harkens from the dawn of the small computer era when Seymore Papert developed something called Logo to teach programming to children:

This next video is one man’s crazy idea to enable third world children to completely skip industrialization and move from agrarian culture to the information age. Another alumni from the MIT Media Lab, Nicholas Negroponte talks about the deployment of the OLPC (One Laptop per Child) program:

In this last video the protagonist looked outside his office window, to a wall that separated his nice surroundings from a slum and thought, I wonder what would happen if… Thus began Sugata Mitra‘s “Hole in the Wall/Digital Divide“ studies:

Please review these videos and come to our Wimba session ready to talk about the Role of Technology in Education.

Sources:

* The Internet? Bah! Hype alert: Why cyberspace isn’t, and will never be, nirvana, by Clifford Stoll | NEWSWEEK (From the magazine issue dated Feb 27, 1995). http://www.newsweek.com/id/106554 retrieved on 12/7/2009

* Youtube video: Seymour Papert 1983 posted by cynthiaso. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOf4EMN6-XA retrieved on 12/7/2009

* TED video: Negroponte takes OLPC to Colombia. http://www.ted.com/talks/nicholas_negroponte_takes_olpc_to_colombia.html retrieved on 12/7/2009

* TED video: Sugata Mitra shows how kids teach themselves. http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_themselves.html retrieved on 12/7/2009

        

Part three of my three part media merry-go-round: Creative Commons (Part 1: Copyright; Part 2: Fair-Use; Part 3: Creative Commons). After I’ve scared them to death with the all powerful Copyright, and confused them with the slippery Fair-Use, it’s time calm the nerves with a little common sense Creative Commons. I wish it was really that simple. So, as before the following is the ongoing working prototype for part 3:

When: Fourth week on a time and day selected by your small group and the course director (NOTE: There is no archive you must do everything you can to attend your small groups session) The Creative Commons Solution Pre-session videos & Information: Please make sure to preview the following videos and read through the information listed below before our session together A Shared Culture Mayer and Bettle Explain Creative Commons Mayer and Bettle explain what Creative Commons is and how it works. A short promotional animation created for Creative Commons Australia and the Queensland University of Technology (QUT). Creative Commons is a license platform that recognizes that there needs to be an easy to understand way for content creators to communicate their sharing choices that falls between “All Rights Restricted” and “Public Domain.” Larry Lessig’s TED Talk about Remix Culture: If you would like further information on Creative Commons consult the following cartoons (this is an optional activity): Creative Commons Comic part1 Creative Commons Comic part2 Creative Commons Comic part3 Creative Commons Comic part4 Media & Good Netiquette: Please watch the following video, we will be discussing it as it might related to our readings in “Art of Possibility”: Stickam Meeting Instructions: 1. Please make sure you have your headset plugged in and on. The point of using Stickam is that you will all be on camera during the whole session, so have a light on and a smile on your face. 2. Please look at pre-session videos and information listed above. We will be discussing Creative Common, Good Netiquette & final thoughts on the Art of Possibility. Hint: If you don’t know what these words mean, you might want to do a little research on these words. 3. Log into your Skype account. Whoever sees all of the small group members is free to set-up the conference call (make sure to include your course director). 4. Go to our meeting site at: http://homepage.mac.com/edm613/pages/edm613stickam.html If you have a problem with the site listed above you can go to: http://web.me.com/edm613/edm613/Wk4_Stickam_Session.html username & password available upon request For full instructions go to Wk3 Stickam Prep 5. Be Prepared to discuss this week’s activities & projects (above) 6. Course Q&A/Open discussion Finally, please make every effort to be here – we benefit from each others’ input, questions and concerns. There is no archive created for these sessions. You’ll need to meet with a small group member for an info round up and then create a blog entry with the title: “Week 4 Stickam” and write a paragraph (minimum 5 sentences) about your thoughts or comments on the session based on your conversation with a small group member who attended the session. For attendees the blog entry is optional. Both attendees & non-attendees please make sure to click the DONE button at the bottom of this page. Sources: animated clipart images from microsoft.com, http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/clipart/default.aspx image and video: A Shared Culture: Creative Commons, http://creativecommons.org/videos/a-shared-culture retrieved 7/26/2009 Blip.tv video: Mayer and Bettle explain Creative Commons, http://creativecommons.org/videos/mayer-and-bettle retrieved on 7/18/2009 TED Video: Larry Lessig on Remix Culture, http://www.ted.com/talks/larry_lessig_says_the_law_is_strangling_creativity.html retrieved on 7/26/2009 images: Spectrum of Rights Comics, http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Spectrumofrights_Comic1 retrieved 7/26/2009 Youtube video: The Science Behind the Secret, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRhk5_4xOa8 retrieved on 7/26/2009

        

Recently one of my students confessed: I’m really not a twitter fan, I get frustrated to see what people are posting and not being able to comment back. I’m trying to figure out what app I can get on my iPhone that will double post to twitter and facebook. I prefer facebook because I can make comments back. Regardless of my preference, I can’t deny the cultural impact of twitter. (Alice K.)

image capture by playerx

Following is a video of Clay Shirkey at TED that my student included in her blog post:

Sources:

EDM613 wk4: Clay Shirkey and Twitter by Alice Keeler, http://www.selfservebaker.com/mathblog/?p=156 Retrieved 7/3/2009

Video: Clay Shirkey at TED, http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/575

image: Twitter Fail Whale is back by playerx, http://www.flickr.com/photos/playerx/3090739418/ Retrieved on 7/9/2009