End of the Semester

Busy today, so the information/humor ratio will be rather high.

At long last, the semester is drawing to a close - there are three days of class left and then the tests begin. Consequently, the next two weeks will be a flurry of grading and panicked undergraduates. Yee-hah.

In other news, the biodiversity talk went well. About sixty people attended (both students and faculty); people were sitting on the floor and standing in the hallway to listen. It can't help but do the ego good. ;-)

I'll be submitting an abstract for a book on new religions; I have an idea for an article on the epistemological challenge posed by parody religions like Pastafarianism - the religion of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. There has been a recurring problem in both the philosophy and psychology of religion - there really isn't a clearly defined concept of what constitutes a valid religion. A number of ideas have been thrown around over the years, with some theorists becoming pretty influential, but there haven't been any criteria that don't apply equally to the genuinely held beliefs of some of the religiously fixated patients with whom I used to work. Religions propose what amount to coherent frameworks - rules are created that are internally consistent (at least in principle), but there is no means by which one can step outside that framework to establish whether it is objectively true or false. So, consequently, any belief set that proposes a similar internally coherent framework has just as much claim to truth as any other. This ends up having some pretty interesting consequences - the set of all beliefs that constitute potentially valid religions balloons. The book explores aspects of beliefs of some of the newer religions (e.g., Scientology, the Church of Latter Day Saints, the Raelians, etc.), and the editors expressed interest in seeing something on parody religions. We'll see what happens.

Aside from this, the day will be spent grading, hitting the gym, and doing laundry. I hosted poker last night, so I'm all about having a low-key day today. I'm working my way through the massive amounts of shish-kebab and rice I made for last night.

Time for lunch and the Pens game. Alles Gute.