The scene revolves around two characters: Echo (played by Eliza Dushku) and Daniel (Alexis Denisof). Echo is a ‘doll’, a person who ‘willingly’ agreed to become whatever character a person wants. While her ‘real’ name is Caroline, her stable identity as a doll is Echo (all the dolls in this dollhouse are named after the NATO phonetic alphabet); her identity in this episode is Bree.  I put willingly in scare quotes because it was either this or jail — and most of the dolls became dolls because they were either forced into it (e.g. blackmail) or seduced into it while in a moment of weakness. The premise behind the dolls is that when a person signs up, their whole identity is removed and placed in a storage unit (so it’s a fancy hard drive). They are then loaded with custom-made identities when needed, turning them into whatever that identity is, along with the muscle memory and intuition of that persona (e.g. if one is loaded with the identity of a secret ninja assassin, that person not only acts like a secret ninja assassin but also has the ‘whole package’ that someone who was trained for many years as a secret ninja assassin would have). At the end of last season, Echo began to see through the given persona and realise herself in spite of the memory removal processes. Throughout this season, she has been seeing her many personas resurface. It is in this scene (immediately after a strange event that triggered it), where she again realises her composite identity. I believe the best line in the scene is when she says ‘It’s like I can see the seams, how it’s all constructed. I’m not real. I’m not who I think I am’.

Perrin is a US senator trying to expose the dollhouse, however it is revealed that he is a doll (well, a doll version of himself). In the second part of the clip, he begins to experience the same kind of ‘composite event’ that Echo has been experience, but he wants to deny it by saying ‘I know who I am’. But he has doubts: ‘please tell me I know who I am’. As we experience Others more, we are beginning to see that we aren’t who we think we are. Identity is a synthesis of events (both past and future), a simple placeholder — an empty square. To realise this nature of our identity is the beginning of becoming what we are. In other words, identity isn’t a transcendent unity emerging through the past into the present; it is a field of immanence reaching from the unlived future into the past. As a result, it is always fragmentary and incomplete. To identify is to become.

In the blogosphere, Jim West is a reputable person and even well-liked by other decent folk. He’s a Christian pastor and adjunct instructor, holding some postgraduate degrees and membership in a few key professional associations. Chances are, he even helps his landlady carry out her garbage. However, Jim also leads a second life, one lived in computers, where he goes by the hacker alias ‘JWest‘ [1]…

Recently, Jim posted a blog about naming sex offenders. The following play-by-play is in place in case Jim decides to delete more comments and make it difficult to contextualise this award. As one can read, the first comment asks about a particular case known colloquially as ‘Romeo and Juliet‘ clauses. Jim replied that he did not see a difference between a couple who was already having sex before one of them became an adult (which suddenly turns the relationship into a forbidden act) and a case of an adult taking advantage of a minor (i.e. actual rape). At this point, Anthony Paul Smith joined in the chorus, asking if Jim was serious in not being able to discern a difference between the two cases. Jim responds by immediately fabricating a straw-man and asking Anthony if he thinks it is acceptable for a young adult male to rape a young female (following the Romeo and Juliet law). Anthony begins to take offense with Jim’s accusation, as it is a poor reading of Anthony’s post. He then details the ‘Romeo and Juliet’ situation clearly and says that this is different from the situation in the original post (the 15-year-old raping a 5-year-old). And this is where Jim’s character starts to show. He responds by implying that Anthony (1) was leading an immoral life, (2) is defending immoral actions, (3) had premarital sex, and (4) committed statutory rape:

finally, over a long life, i’ve discovered that the people most willing to defend immorality are the ones who themselves have behaved immorally. so i’m guessing that you’ve had both premarital sex and sex with a minor. i’m sure you won’t admit it, but given the facts and your extremely clear interest in defending the action of the 20 year old, i’m sure i’m right.

Any reasonable person being accused of such would take great offense to this, as it is a very low blow, doubly so if it is fabricated. Anthony is a reasonable person. Jim’s response to the offense is to try to weasel his way out by saying that he was only asking a question. That’s not an appropriate response, especially coming from someone who is (1) a Christian, (2) a pastor, and (3) an educated, professional person.

So, let’s get to know our week’s honoree. First, Jim holds degrees (MDiv and ThM) from Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, a fairly conservative Southern Baptist seminary. It’s clear that he holds to a form of morality that is prevalent in the Southern Baptist Conventions, which is a perfectly acceptable thing (I say this as someone who grew up in the SBC and has attended SBC schools at both grade-level and university-level). What’s not acceptable, however, is attacking a person’s credibility in an argument by fabricating accusations of possibly illegal activity. We can cite various passages from the Bible to this end, but I’d rather jump right to Jim’s institutional beliefs: the Baptist Faith and Message (I know and highly respect one of the members of the committee who drafted this). I’ll just cite the ultimate sentence in section XV (‘The Christian and the Social Order): In order to promote these ends Christians should be ready to work with all men of good will in any good cause, always being careful to act in the spirit of love without compromising their loyalty to Christ and His truth. Are Jim’s responses and accusations done ‘in the spirit of love without compromising [his] loyalty to Christ and His truth’? I was originally against writing this post because I thought Jim would be a reasonable person himself and, when faced with such a concern as this, he would offer some gleam of righteousness. Instead, Jim deleted my comments and continued on.

Secondly, Jim also holds a doctorate from Andersonville Baptist Seminary and uses the academic honorific of ‘doctor’. However, after Jim’s unprofessional conduct and some research, I have to question the veracity of such a claim. First, Andersonville is accredited by two organisations (Transworld and ACSI) which are not recognised as valid accreditation agencies in the US (search for yourself). Secondly, the level of work required for that degree is half as long and (apparently) without much quality research compared to accredited programs. Thirdly, the level of conduct Jim has displayed in his comments to Anthony show a lack of self-control and professionalism. Had he been in a professional position (e.g. a faculty member in an accredited institution), his institution would reprimand him for much less. I’ve seen faculty members in ‘liberal’ public universities reprimanded for discussing sexuality in a class directly about sex.

In a discussion about morality, ethics, and the law, Jim doesn’t seem to practice what he preaches, but perhaps that is a normal thing in the SBC that I somehow missed. Perhaps it is because Jim is not a professional (in which case, my claims of unprofessionalism do not apply). It’s still impossible to make these derogatory comments and claim moral high ground. If one wants to claim to be a moral, righteous, upright, or ethical person, one should not make such claims that could be construed as defamation.

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1. I hope the reference to The Matrix is not lost here.

I take the main focus of the film to be that religious faith and objective science is incompatible. In fact, religious faith is now an absurdity in these modern times. Maher travels quite a bit throughout the US, Europe, and Israel interviewing people who would generally be classified as fundamentalists in their approaches to theology. At one point, he is interviewing Ken Ham (of Answers in Genesis and its Creation Museum fame). He takes Ham to task in resolving huge differences between scientific evidence and the “common sense” literal reading of creation espoused by young Earth creationism. From my perspective, Ham’s creationism here has already lost its sense of direction by adopting the language and system of scienctific observation that negates the teleological goal of creationism. In oversimplified terms, Ham’s creation science is much like trying to raise freshwater fish in salt water; the freshwater fish behave at the cellular/organic level differently than saltwater fish. The language and goals of the creation story in Genesis, much like the stories of Christ in the Gospels, are not meant to adhere to modern-day scientific (or biographical) literature. In this respect, Maher is spot on with his critique of faith. If one holds religious faith to be coterminal with empirical science, faith will always lose because it centers on phenomena that exceed the bounds empirical science has made for itself.

On the other hand, Maher’s critique is the the “atheist version” of the very thing he critiques. In one segment, he is asking a few Muslims (including an imam) about the Qur’an. His questions fall along the lines of “the Qur’an says to kill infidels, is this true?” Every Muslim asked answers the question along the lines of “that is not how we interpret that text because it was linked to a particular historical context that no longer exists.” Maher pushes his point by denying the possibility of interpretation, setting himself up as the more accurate interpreter than the believers who study the text! This is the same thing that he critiques people such as Ken Ham (and others). In other words, Maher wants religious/theological hermeneutics to be a closed event ripped from any context and made into an absolute ideological framework in order to reject religion. He then rationalises his work by claiming its standpoint of doubt is the best position.

Ironically, it is here that Maher again falls prey to the very thing he criticises. If doubt is the best place to stand, he hasn’t doubted enough! The “true” sceptic is the one that doubts everything, not just what one is prejudiced against. Maher emphasis empirical science as the strongest evidence for his position, yet he never doubts the framework of assumptions that undergird the empirical sciences. He never suggests that empirical evidence itself may be already tainted by a predisposition to certain beliefs (namely, that an external world exists and is discernable). Obviously, then, Maher should insist that some kind of belief is “acceptable” without entering into fundamentalism or scepticism. It seems, then, that the rational position is somewhere between the fundamentalism he decries while using and the scepticism he touts while evading.

One last thing of interesting note is that Maher suggests in his film that science has discovered a gene that is linked to belief in God. Ironically, the original researcher said that it was linked to spirituality and “feeling God’s presense” and not to simple belief in God. Further, these findings were never published in peer-reviewed literature. Even more striking is that this gene can also be associated with the feeling of beloning to a political party. In other words, it isn’t a very strong theory and it doesn’t suggest that belief in God is a genetic trait. Perhaps if Maher had utilised more of his “scepticism,” he would have noticed that.

Writing

• Finish up the 5000 word excerpt of my thesis for my annual review.
• A conference paper on Deleuze’s Logic of Sense as it relates to theological hermeneutics (which overlaps a bit with the previous item)
• A review of Adam Kotsko’s Zizek and Theology
• An additional 15k-ish words of my thesis working on ontology and metaphysics and their relationship to hermeneutics and symbolism

Reading

• Badiou’s Being and Event
• Badiou’s Logics of Worlds
• Zizek’s Parallax View
• Milbank and Zizek’s Monstrosity of Christ
• Levi Bryant’s Difference and Givenness
• Graham Harman’s Prince of Networks

Errata

• Update a few PHP scripts that I’ve been meaning to do for nearly a year
• Step down from my PHP scripting roles as I don’t have the time anymore (sorry guys!)
• Spend a month inundating myself with every tourist spot in Great Britain (and many in Ireland)
• ConnectDeleuze conference in Cologne
• “Brush up” on my French and German
• Added late: switch server hosting to a simpler plan

• 23-25 April: Bristol, England for the Speculative Realism/Speculative Materialism workshop/conference.  I’ll also be visiting some friends down there (you know who you are).
• 16-18 May: Florence, Italy for a quick 3-day getaway with my wife.
• Weekend of 4 July or 11 July: Ireland for another quick 3-day getaway, probably flying into Dublin.
• 18 July – 2 August: Running about the UK.  The actual dates and places haven’t been decided yet as I’m waiting to find out when my mother-in-law and sister-in-law are coming.  We’ll be hitting London, as well some of the tourist fun and exciting spots around the UK.  I’d really like to get over to the Hebrides (those islands directly west of mainland Scotland) as well as Loch Ness.
• 9 – 13 August: Cologne, Germany for the annual CONNECTDeleuze conference.
• September: Looking at another 3-day getaway to Barcelona, Spain.

It can be real easy to get cheap flights within Europe (150 quid for two to Italy!).  It also helps to stay in hostels that cost under £50 a night as well….That means a 3-day getaway costs  under £400 for everything.  Airlines in the US still have a thing or two to learn regarding flights which it seems Europe has done pretty well (e.g. tickets for £5 or less before taxes/fees).