Effective Altruism, Desire to Amputate & Alberta Urbanism
Here’s your weekly roundup of everything I’ve curated or created online, April 14–20, 2024.
Thought-Provoking Content
The Deaths of Effective Altruism by Leif Wenar in Wired:
Extreme poverty is not about me, and it’s not about you. It’s about people facing daily challenges that most of us can hardly imagine. If we decide to intervene in poor people's lives, we should do so responsibly—ideally by shifting our power to them and being accountable for our actions.
The Necessity of Networks: The Case of William Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect by James C. Rahn in The Hedgehog Review:
There are numerous historical examples of dense networks making significant changes in society to the point of redefining reality.
The Economy Is Strong. Why Are Our National Finances So Weak? by Megan McArdle
If we can’t balance our books now, when everything is going well, how will we manage it later, when our growing debt might push up interest rates, crowding out private investment and worsening the budget math?
When we need to restore some semblance of balance, we’ll already have used up the most politically palatable options.
Quebec Man Has Two Healthy Fingers Amputated to Relieve ‘Body Integrity Dysphoria’ by Sharon Kirkey in National Post:
Body integrity dysphoria, or BID, [is] a rare and complex condition characterized by an intense desire to amputate a perfectly healthy body part, such as an arm or a leg.
While cutting off healthy, functioning body parts for psychological distress raises ethical concerns, BID sufferers sometimes resort to self-mutilation or “black-market” amputations, risking their lives.
They Flew?: Making Sense of Levitating Saints by Daniel K. Williams by Mere Orthodoxy:
In an early modern European society on the cusp of the scientific revolution, there were plenty of skeptics who wanted to see such miracles with their own eyes before they would believe—and they did. Some of the human flights were conducted outdoors in front of numerous witnesses, a phenomenon that Eire says was probably impossible to fake with any of the technology available at the time.
How ‘Nones’—the Religiously Unaffiliated—Are Finding Meaning, Purpose and Spirituality in Psychedelic Churches by Morgan Shipley at Religion News Service:
A key lesson members connect to psychedelics is the intrinsic sacredness of each person: The divine is not elsewhere but within everyone.
Canada’s Long Restoration Has Begun: Young Elites Must Escape the Garrison Mentality by Michael Cuenco by UnHerd:
Canada ... is no less a product of liberal modernity than America, but where the latter’s agrarian clime birthed a republican state, the former’s harsh geography created what we might call a company-state, with its emphasis on corporate order and commercial progress over popular liberty and civic virtue as a better means of achieving the conquest of nature.
The deference (or docility) often associated with Canadians is not ... that of the vassal to his lord but that of the worker to his manager, and that of the manager to the corporate board.
Alberta’s Population Growth Is Breaking Records, but Signs of Strain Are Showing by Amanda Stephenson at CityNews/The Canadian Press:
The Alberta government’s own projections call for the province’s population to hit six million people as early as 2039.
New homes are simply not being built fast enough to keep up with the province’s growth. New arrivals to Alberta are struggling to find family doctors, and unprecedented school enrolment growth has led to overcrowded classrooms.
There is also a shortage of construction workers, welders and all of the other skilled tradespeople needed to build everything from houses to schools to roads as quickly as possible.
Alberta Urbanism: Underrated Successes and Massive Challenges by Patrick and Jasmine on Oh the Urbanity! (YouTube):
When people hear Calgary and Edmonton they typically think of low density suburbs sprawling into the vast unobstructed openness of the Canadian prairies. But these two cities are actually denser than you'd expect for North America especially given their populations.
How Far Does Forgiveness Reach? by Denise Uwimana in Plough:
He was aghast at what he had done. What had possessed him to commit such unspeakable deeds? The mental torture was so intense, he was certain hell could be no worse.
One of the Most Overlooked Arguments for the Resurrection by Michael J. Kruger in Cannon Fodder:
We cannot just have any ol’ explanation for how the disciples came to believe Jesus was Messiah even though he had died. ... It has to be an explanation that has the weight and power to overturn the entrenched expectations of the disciples—indeed, one might say the expectations of all of ancient Judaism.
Music
I like where music is going:
Thanks be unto Jesus
Thanks be unto God
He has won the battle
Through the power of the cross!
Denial ain't just a river, you know?
Devotional
“In the Beginning”
By Pastor David Hamstra
To understand Jesus as he is presented in the Bible is to understand his story. For, stories are the Bible's default way of reasoning about things. The collection of books that makes up the Bible is, according to the Bible, telling one big story: the story of Jesus (John 5:39).
How does the whole Bible tell the story of Jesus? In brief, the authors of the Bible who knew Jesus realized that what they had experienced with him was like they were re-living the stories of all the other books of the Bible that were written before Jesus. And this is how Jesus himself eventually taught his followers to interpret those books (Luke 24:27).
To see how that makes sense, we’ll have to get into the story, and the usual place to get into a story is “in the beginning.” Those are literally the first words of the first book of the Bible (Genesis 1:1). They are also the first words of the story of Jesus’s life according to his friend John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was present with God, and the Word was God. This one was present with God in the beginning” (John 1:1–2).
To get why this presence “in the beginning” was repeated by John we must read a bit further in Genesis: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was extremely empty, and darkness was over the surface of the primordial sea, and the Spirit of God was blowing back and forth over the surface of the water” (Genesis 1:1–2).
John is saying that there is this thing called “the Word” that was present with God when God began to create our world and that this Word really is God: “All things came into existence through him, and without him was not even one thing made.” (John 1:3). So, this Word is a “he”—a person—and through him God created everything.
John is making a subtle point that refers to the similar sounding words for “word” and “say” in the original language of Genesis, Hebrew. In the next verse, we find the first instance of a formula repeated throughout the chapter that describes how God created: “And God said [literally, ‘worded’], “Let there be light,” and there was light” (Genesis 1:3).
Now we can appreciate John’s main point: “And the Word became flesh and resided among us. And we saw his glory—glory like a one-of-a-kind being sent from the Father—full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). What John saw in the goodness of Jesus during the three-and-a-half years they spent together was like the shining light of God (the Father) at creation, and he became convinced that Jesus was the personal Word through whom God had ‘worded’ everything into existence.
Some people ask, “If God created everything, what created God?” This is like asking why triangles have three sides because God is, by definition, the end of our causal explanations. Unless you are willing to live without an answer to the question of why there is something rather than nothing or think that stuff has always just sort of been here in some form or another then whatever it is you think basically caused everything else to come into existence is to you, in that way, “god.”
Even if we deal with it in different ways, everyone eventually confronts the mystery of our origins. But John recognized that his friend Jesus was the Mystery of our origins, as revealed in the first book of the Bible, confronting him in the flesh. He and the other Bible writers who know Jesus were persuaded that he was God not only because everything about his life not only evidenced a compelling resemblance to the story of God in the Bible but also completed it in the most satisfying way that could only have been arranged by God himself.
If that’s true, it changes everything. For that reason, I think we should afford the authors of the Bible the basic respect of trying to understand what they were saying in the way that it made sense to them and then decide whether what they said about Jesus also makes sense to us.