2010-10-24 2145: A member of the vestry at my church asked me if I would be willing to talk to the congregation about stewardship. I wasn't sure I wanted to do that, but he got me to write a letter. It appeared in the announcements sheet in the order of worship this morning. It seemed to be well-received, so thought I would reproduce it here:
I am grateful for the intelligent and sensible theology of the Episcopal Church and in particular our parish; I've been to other churches where the worship is exciting and there are many activities to participate in—but whose theology remind me of Alice in Wonderland, where the Red Queen tells Alice that she isn't trying hard enough to believe in impossible things ("Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast!").
I am also grateful to be able to worship God in a church with beautiful liturgies with serious and wonderful music.
I am grateful to be in a parish that is genuinely welcoming and accepting to people like myself who are so often only tolerated, if not condemned, by other churches. I am most of all grateful to be in a parish with a warm fellowship and good friends who have become such a large part of my life.
I am continually grateful for a parish that has kept me on a path of faith that I have had trouble staying on in the past before I came here.
Of course, I want to help our parish; I would be broken-hearted if our parish ever fell apart or faltered. So I am glad to pledge to the parish, because I know how important it is for the parish to be able to plan its budgets for the year. This is a responsibility that I am very grateful to be able to share.
2010-10-05 2200: Wired ran a little article last week, under the heading "Tinfoil Tuesdays," about the press conference last week on alleged UFO activity at nuclear missile bases. Retired launch control officers claimed that missile systems mysteriously went off-line when base personnel saw glowing lights above the base; several such incidents were described that occurred between 1963 and 1980. This prompts me to observe Tinfoil Tuesday here, today.
I was very interested in UFOs when I was a kid. I was something of a believer in my late teens, although I never was completely sure they existed. I was strongly influenced by the book The UFO Experience by the astronomer J. Allen Hynek. He was the originator of the UFO classification scheme that inspired the title of the wonderful old Spielberg movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind (he was honored by a cameo in the movie; he appears during the Devil's Tower scene). Hynek was originally an enthusiastic debunker of UFOs for the Air Force in the 1960s, during the Project Blue Book days, but as he saw more genuinely difficult-to-explain cases, he became convinced that they represented a major scientific mystery. I saw Hynek in person once; he gave a slide show, relating a variety of UFO cases. (The one I remember him describing involved a wheat farmer finding a round silver object in his field.)
But in later years, as no progress seemed to happen in the world of UFOs, I became more skeptical. I became especially skeptical in the late 1980s when the subject seemed to become mired in endless debates about the alleged Roswell, New Mexico UFO crash, and also impossible-to-verify stories of alien abductions.
So it was with some surprise I read of a new book on the subject, UFOs, by an investigative reporter named Leslie Kean, that appeared to be an interesting update on the subject. Partly out of nostalgia, I got a copy. She discusses a variety of cases, including some of the missile base incidents mentioned above, but she focuses her attention on generals and other military personnel who describe cases and reports from military or quasi-official groups associated with the French government, the Belgian military, or other countries. Much of this material is actually well-known in UFO circles (being ten or more years old), but I wasn't familiar with some of it, which made the book interesting reading. Two cases in particular raised my eyebrows: the UFO incident over O'Hare airport in November, 2006; and the "Phoenix Lights" incident in March of 1997. The FAA described the former as a weather phenomenon, but Kean claims several witnesses (United Airlines personnel) told her that it was a metallic disk that hovered over the United terminal for a number of minutes before departing at high speed (punching a hole in the clouds as it left). The Phoenix Lights were explained as flares dropped by Air National Guard aircraft; but the flares were late in the evening, while earlier in the evening a large, triangular object flew a distance of 200 miles across the state as described by many witnesses. Kean's book includes a brief statement by Fife Symington, who was governor of Arizona at the time; he now says he saw one of the objects himself. (At the time, he treated the subject with levity in an attempt to calm down the public.)
One other set of UFO incidents is detailed in Kean's book: the Belgian UFO wave of 1989. These also involved large triangular objects that were said to fly very slowly and with little sound, often at low altitude, but which would also fly away at enormous speeds. But I recall reading something circa 1992 in Aviation Week and Space Technology that made me skeptical of these triangular objects: a story about a rumored top-secret aircraft whose description matched these objects. It was said to be a large, delta wing lighter-than-air craft capable of going very slow (walking speed) at low altitude without being noticed. It supposedly had a clever camouflage system: twinkly stars on its underside that would move against the motion of the vehicle, so that anyone underneath would see stationary stars and not see a large moving object silhouetted against the stars. Except for the reported high-speed maneuvers of the real UFOs, the description fit nicely. (However, two decades later, I haven't seen any public acknowledgement that the rumored military aircraft ever existed.)
As I read Kean's book, I was quite impressed. But as I read more about the subject last month, using Google to dig up more information, I became less impressed. Apparently, Kean's investigative reporting on UFOs didn't get much beyond a familiar (to UFO enthusiasts) cast of characters. In particular, she makes extensive use of an English writer, Nick Pope, who once ran Britain's equivalent of Project Blue Book. Pope was suitably interesting in Kean's book, but I found out he's written his own books on the subject, where he seems to give credence to crop circles and cattle mutilations—subjects with convincing mundane explanations. Many UFO books are frustrating to the reader, in that they present incredible information but information the reader cannot verify. Kean's book is no exception; for example, none of her witnesses in the O'Hare incident are willing to go public.
Yet if Kean's book is not as convincing as I first thought, it was indeed nostalgic for me. This was in part because her choice of topics (classic cases involving lights and disks seen by military personnel) hearkens back to the 1960s and 1970s, before the later emphasis on alien abductions in UFO circles. Her book reminded me of Hynek's The UFO Experience; both authors call for the formation of quasi-official groups to investigate UFOs (Hynek's call was for an "underground college" of scientists).
Anyway, I am still skeptical about this subject. Yet, I have to say that if there were ever some kind of public disclosure that UFOs are actually real (as objects under intelligent but non-human control), I wouldn't be entirely surprised.
2010-10-03 1830: The Friends of Jake blog had an extremely interesting post about the prominent geneticist Francis Collins and his friendship with noted atheist and author Christopher Hitchens. Collins shared in the discovery of the gene responsible for cystic fibrosis, and he directed the Human Genome Project; he now heads the National Institutes for Health. He is also a devout evangelical Christian who defends the theory of evolution in his book The Language of God. The Friends of Jake post has an excerpt from a Washington Post piece by Collins about his friendship with Hitchens; he says he appreciates Hitchen's intellect and acknowledges it "challenged my own defense of the rationality of faith to be more consistent and compelling." Collins quotes a wonderful verse from Proverbs: "As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another." The Friends of Jake poster ("IT," who describes him or herself as an atheist, a scientist and a gay, married Californian) notes that Collins holds an MD and a PhD, and has practiced medicine; "IT" suggests that physicians are more likely to be people of faith than pure scientists, and he or she speculates that this is because physicians must deal with cancer and other life-threatening situations.
By the way, the post just mentioned has a link to an earlier post on Friends of Jake about the controversy attending Collins's nomination (by President Obama) to head the NIH; "militant atheist" Sam Harris and some scientists were opposed to letting a "fuzzy" thinking Christian believer run the NIH, but "IT" expressed support for Collins. That post has a link to Collins's own web site on issues of faith and science: BioLogos.