Critiques by Creation

The Fred Phelps Supreme Court Decision and Why We Shouldn’t Look for Loopholes in the First Amendment

We don’t have the right to be protected from hearing ideas we find upsetting. The expression of opinions we find upsetting — opinions on public matters, expressed in a public place, in a manner that does not invade private space — is exactly what the First Amendment was written to defend.

I think Fred Phelps was a terrible, evil person. I remember, though, when the Westboro Baptist Church was the face of anti-gay sentiment in America. I remember when some people actually listened to Fred Phelps.

I deeply regret the sorrow and trauma that this soldiers’ parents had to undergo. I do believe, however, that when the Westboro Baptist Church picketed soldiers’ funerals, they destroyed a lot of anti-gay credibility. They made homophobes look crazy – and maybe made a few people question their own beliefs about homosexuality.

I hope that we watch the Westboro Baptist Church. I hope that the minute they throw a rock at a gay person, or suggest that gay people should be killed, we will bring the full weight of the law down upon them. But until that day comes? Have your free speech, you miserable motherfuckers. I hope you choke on it.

Being bored doesn’t mean that “there’s nothing to do,” as children imprecisely complain to their parents on a rainy day, dragging their feet on the rug and kicking the sofa. It means that something big—whether it’s rain, other people, or our own hot-to-the-touch fears—is keeping us from doing what we want to do, from playing outside, from expressing ourselves, from moving forward.

Patients, Patients: Television: The New Yorker

From the Washington Post, scientists at NIH have discovered that when volunteers visualize themselves giving a sum of money to charity, the parts of their brains associated with pleasure light up:

The results were showing that when the volunteers placed the interests of others before their own, the generosity activated a primitive part of the brain that usually lights up in response to food or sex. Altruism, the experiment suggested, was not a superior moral faculty that suppresses basic selfish urges but rather was basic to the brain, hard-wired and pleasurable.

More specifically, giving money to a charitable organization causes activity in similar parts of the brain that light up when people receive money for themselves. Both donating to charitable causes and receiving money activate the VTA–striatum mesolimbic network, the same pathways that control more basic pleasures. Charitable giving also has an additional support – the subgenual area, which influences social attachment and affiliative reward mechanisms.

I’d love to see I’d like to see more research done on this. In the “selfish gene” era, it’s wonderful to see people explore the basic roots of human kindness and out tendency to give.

References:

Moll, J., Krueger, F., Zahn, R., Pardini, M., de Oliveira-Souza, R., & Grafman, J. (2006). Human fronto-mesolimbic networks guide decisions about charitable donation. PNAS, 103(42), 15623-15628.