June 2007

Daniel Baird’s review of three prominent polemics against religion rightly points out the utter failure of Dawkins, Harris, and Onfray to take the full breadth of human experience seriously, preferring instead to traffic in rhetorically striking, yet logically suspect, condemnations of religious belief.

I wonder, however, if all Baird leaves us with is a vaguely defined notion of the “religious impulse,” useful for scratching an itch we can’t explain and, at the same time, resistant to any attempt to explain it away. Baird speaks of the Kol Nidre service he attended with his daughter as “deep and powerful” but stops well short of affirming that it makes any kind of meaningful contact with objective reality. While this benign view of religious belief is certainly to be preferred to the invective of Dawkins and company, I find myself wondering if Baird has taken his own argument seriously enough.

If the impulse to seek meaning and transcendence is indeed as pervasive and persistent as Baird suggests, if “the fear of the abyss of meaninglessness” forces us to posit a creator and redeemer to “honestly read our experience of the world as substantive,” it may be that religious belief represents more than a psychological coping mechanism necessary for dealing with the harshness of reality. We have to ask why it would occur to us that our lives ought to have meaning or that our experience of the world should be substantive. Perhaps religious belief is one important way in which we learn to see the world, and our experience of it, as it really is.
Ryan Dueck
Vancouver, British Columbia

Your Attention, Please
In “Driven to Distraction” (April) John Lorinc advances an effective argument against the persistent misperception that doing many things at once somehow saves us time — a particularly important message for business managers who undermine their own objectives by ignoring the numerous studies that exist on the matter. I would underscore Jeffrey Jones’s point that “you have to have some time when you are unavailable.” YouTube, chat rooms, and the blogosphere don’t, as Lorinc suggests, “suck up time” so much as we give it to them. This distinction is critical to motivating self-guidance.

However, while concentration is crucial for certain kinds of tasks, it is precisely the opposite for creative thinking and thought connecting. Awareness of multiple related and unrelated inputs can provide valuable inspiration and insight in certain situations, especially those already well served by “deep thought.” The wider the selection of sources, the more opportunity there is for cross-pollination. I often tell friends that I’d rather attend a gathering of biologists, musicians, mathematicians, and hat makers than another Internet conference where everyone is regurgitating the same information — only the former actually gets my brain firing.

This barrage of information is hardly wasted, nor is there really a memory conundrum. While we wilfully and rightly discard most of the details of a broad information survey, what of the impressions the data leave behind? These memories are a key form of the intelligence that operates during rapid cognition, helping us to make decisions in a blink.
Nathon Gunn
ceo, Bitcasters
Toronto, Ontario

I grew up with Nintendo 64 and a digital cable box with 800 channels, so it’s no surprise that I don’t have any trouble becoming accustomed to new technology. My parents, however, didn’t grow up with such necessities, and they don’t seem to have any problem becoming friends with technology either.