The latest chap­ter in orga­nized religion’s millennia-​old quest to con­vert the hea­thens is play­ing out in Angola. A Wall Street Jour­nal arti­cle last week dis­cussed the Pope’s recent efforts to per­suade African Catholics to relin­quish the tal­is­mans, witches, curses and shamans of their ves­ti­gial ani­mist traditions.  The sit­u­a­tion raises del­i­cate ques­tions about where to draw the line between the occult of yes­ter­year and gen­uine arti­cles of modern faith. 

“Monkeys Con­trol a Robot Arm With Their Thoughts” (NYT)

A man got to have a code. —Omar, The Wire.

One of the cen­tral tenets of the New Athe­ist pro­gram lately being ped­dled by Richard Dawkins, Daniel Den­nett, Sam Harris, et al., is that ratio­nal athe­ism does not entail moral nihilism. But what hap­pens when sci­en­tists, work­ing in the new field of moral psy­chol­ogy, find out that our moral think­ing depends less on reason than it does on naturally-​selected instinct?

Steven Pinker, in a long essay in this week’s New York Times Mag­a­zine, rec­og­nizes the threat:

“Morally cor­ro­sive” is exactly the term that some crit­ics would apply to the new sci­ence of the moral sense. The attempt to dis­sect our moral intu­itions can look like an attempt to debunk them…. The whole enter­prise seems to be drag­ging us to an amoral nihilism, in which moral­ity itself would be demoted from a tran­scen­dent prin­ci­ple to a fig­ment of our neural circuitry.

Pinker thinks that he can save the appear­ances, but his solu­tions aren’t very con­vinc­ing.

An ode for Paula Dobri­an­sky, John Baird, and all the other nihilists in Bali who press on toward a “triumph where all things falter.”

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A For­saken Garden
Alger­non Charles Swinburne

In a coign of the cliff between low­land and high­land,
At the sea-down’s edge between wind­ward and lee,
Walled round with rocks as an inland island,
The ghost of a garden fronts the sea.
A girdle of brush­wood and thorn encloses
The steep square slope of the blos­som­less bed
Where the weeds that grew green from the graves of its roses
Now lie dead.