Notes of interest today

• In this story on NPR, a mother describes the difficulties of preparing her two boys for the world fo girls, saying her boys have 4 emotions- happy, sad, mad, and hungry- and have a lot to learn to get along in the emotion-filled-adolescent-girl world. It's amusing.


• Sojourners leader Jim Wallis has an op-ed piece in the New York Times today. Read it. Think about it.


• Speaking of Sojourners, they were mentioned in a book I picked up earlier this week, Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky, a book of lectures of Noam Chomsky, a professor of linguistics and political activist (I first learned a little about him in my Natural Language Processing class, and wanted to know more, because I'm such a word geek.). Noam Chomsky said religion is like technology- not inherently good or bad, just used in different ways. He gave the example of the Sojourners compared to Jerry Falwell as two that use religion differently.
  
  The more interesting bit in the book, however, was Chomsky's discussion of whether he believed morality was innate or not. CS Lewis gives a very convincing argument for humans having an innate sense of morality, and this pointing to the existence of God. From the little Chomsky I've read, he doesn't seem to look favorably on religion in general, but he agreed with Lewis, that the moral sense existis in a person without being taught. He likened it to the innate sense of language we as humans have, explaining that, with very little learning, we pick up complex language concepts, and the same seems to be true of morality. I thought it was an interesting idea. I also think that Lewis' second point still holds- that this consistent sense of what is right and good people have points to a greater good being, God, who created these absolutes.