As President Obama correctly noted in his speech in Jerusalem, Zionism and America’s founding myth spring from a common quest: the yearning for a homeland.

But this human search is not universal — even if modernity has produced an ever expanding sense of rootlessness in populations made up of individuals for whom home is an abstraction buried in lost memories or unrealized hopes, not an intimately known place of birth.

People who know exactly where they were born and know this as the point on the planet from which they crawled, walked, climbed and by whatever other means slowly ventured out into the world, form a picture of the world resting on a very granular and specific foundation. Home known this way is not a disputed territory or a divine gift — it’s simply the place one knows better than any other.

From such a home a world is constructed that begins with definite articles: the hill, the river, the house, the field. Out of these utterly unique details a wider world of less distinct generalities only later emerges.

Homes yearned for, on the other hand, are homes to be discovered, created, invoked, declared, and claimed and for Americans and Israelis such homes could only be found by denying the existence of the homes of others.

This act of denial required that each nation fabricate or reinvent a founding mythology in which God gave a land with no people to a people with no land. An earthly paradise could only be created and believed in by destroying the past, dispossessing the native population and driving people out of their homeland.

This is our bond — but it’s not one to celebrate.

Richard Rodriguez writes: We Americans have long told ourselves that we are a God-favored people, a churchgoing, moral people. But last week when the old cardinals of Roman Catholicism looked for the future of their church, they looked south. And what we Americans heard, as if for the first time, is that the spiritual center of Christianity is in the Southern Hemisphere, not with us in the north.

How could that be?

Despite the drug addiction of Americans — an addiction second to none that has destabilized Latin America from Bolivia to Colombia to Mexico — we assume the moral high ground in the Americas. We long have regarded Latin Americans as a morally lazy race, corrupt in their civic life, tolerant of Marxism one day, fascism the next. Now we learn that the beating heart of Christianity is in the south. World Catholicism is centered there. And Protestantism, too, surges throughout Latin America.

We Americans built a wall to separate ourselves from Latin Americans and their disrespect regarding our laws. A number of us tell pollsters or listeners of talk radio that we would deport the millions of Latin Americans who are illegally here, and their children bleating about their “dreams.” Many Americans declare they do not want illegality rewarded in any way.

In the long political debate over illegal immigration, religion and morality have rarely been mentioned by those in power, except by disgraced Cardinal Roger Mahony in Los Angeles. In immigrant rights parades, it’s true, one did see nuns and people carrying crosses, as in a religious procession. But right-wing commentator Pat Buchanan, famously a Catholic, described illegal immigrants from Latin America as a greater threat to our union than Al Qaeda. There was something evil coming from the south.

What went unsaid on talk radio and on the floor of Congress was that were it not for Latin American immigrants, here legally and illegally, many churches in the U.S. would be as empty as Notre Dame cathedral in Paris. And not just Catholic churches.

Increasingly, as young, white Americans abandon organized religion, Latin Americans in the United States have been flocking to evangelical Protestantism. Already, in Central America and Brazil, the rate of conversion to evangelical Protestantism is such that by century’s end, Latin America may be in its majority, evangelical Protestant. Already, Protestant churches are sending missionaries from Latin America north to attend to our barren souls. [Continue reading…]

As Rodriguez goes on to note, the American left is largely uninterested in religion — and I expect that lack of interest is reflected among visitors to this site.

Even so, the strength of religion should interest everyone, irrespective of their religious or political orientation. And those of us with no faith should hesitate to assume that our lack of faith makes us better off.

One of the reasons secularists look down on the religious is out of the conviction that scientific realism will inevitably triumph over religious superstition. But as Rodriguez points out, the decline of religion is not resulting in a demographic rise of secularism. Why? Because as religious belief declines, so does the drive to reproduce.

This probably says less about mere differences in orientation towards life and an afterlife than it does about differences between the irreligious rich and the religious poor.

As people become more immersed in their pursuit of careers, a tension develops between the demands of raising a family and the pursuit of personal achievement outside the family. Simultaneously, the more economic independence the individual acquires, the less reliant he or she becomes on the mutual support provided by family, community, and church. Put simply, the less we need others, the less we procreate.

As we maximize our individual autonomy, we collectively wither. The price for liberating ourselves from religion is that we end up with weaker, atomized societies. The better we can take care of ourselves, the less we care about others.

Having left religion behind, one can’t easily turn back.

Some people want to create churches for the faithless — a goal I can support in spirit. Yet what will provide the glue that holds together such communities? In our resolute individualism, where do we find common ground when there is no ready substitute for shared faith?

We secularists imagine we have an ideological advantage because we believe in this life rather than any other and because we rely on science rather than scripture, but we fall down by over-investing in the material world.

“Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal.”

That can be read as an injunction to the faithful to fix their attention on rewards in heaven, but it also says something to those of us with no faith: that there are false promises attached to most of the material things we can acquire.

Pope Francis has said he wants a poor church, for the poor. As an archbishop he condemned the gross inequalities in his native Argentina and from the perspective of secularists concerned with social justice, these may sound like a call for the redistribution of wealth. The poor must be raised out of poverty.

But remember: this comes from a priest who took a vow of poverty. Granted, there’s a huge difference between poverty that is chosen and poverty from which one hungers to escape, but for those who take such a vow, this is not an exercise in self-abnegation; it’s about the liberating effect of recognizing that ones needs are few.

Ironically, in societies with material abundance, the terms ‘poor’ and ‘needy’ are interchangeable. Yet the more easily we can meet our material needs, the more difficult it becomes to differentiate between needs and desires. Indeed needs met, rather than resulting in contentment, often fuel larger desires.

The top of the ladder of acquisition, rather than being occupied by people who are serenely fulfilled is instead the abode of those who acquire perverse desires — like wanting to live in $200 million apartments.

If one looks at the world not in terms of the distribution of wealth, but the distribution of contentment, it turns out that Latin America ranks highest.

There’s no disputing that in a world where there are clearly enough resources to meet everyone’s basic needs, no one should be dying of hunger, lacking care for treatable diseases, or living in miserable squalor. But another poverty goes unnamed — one that afflicts the rich and causes desire to metastasize, producing concentrations of wealth that serve little good even for those in their possession.

What those protected by military-trained guards, bulletproof glass, and panic rooms, fail to see, is that rather having been supremely successful in acquiring so much, they have instead become the prisoners of their own wealth.

But worse than that, the affliction of excessive wealth is also a curse on others. Not only does the wasteful aggregation of resources necessitate deprivation for others, but the status attached to wealth undermines the dignity of those who possess little.

The reconfiguration of wealth the world needs, cannot be confined to the distribution of material resources, but requires a redefinition of the meaning of wealth.

Only when those who believe they have so much, start to see how much loss acquisition incurs, can a deeper reordering of human values begin.

When it comes to allegations about his complicity in Argentina’s dirty wars, Pope Francis may not be served well by his own staff.

The New York Times reports:

The Rev. Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman, said there had “never been a credible accusation against him” relating to the period in the 1970s when he was the superior of the Jesuit order in Argentina.

Indeed, “there have been many declarations of how much he did for many people to protect them from the military dictatorship,” Father Lombardi said in a statement at a news conference.

“The accusations belong to the use of a historical-social analysis of facts for many years by the anticlerical left to attack the church and must be rejected decisively.”

This is a standard public relations deflection: don’t directly address the content of the criticism, but instead treat it as an expression of the identity of a critic who is supposedly hostile to the identity of those being attacked.

We are being attacked because of who we are — not because of how we act.

As soon as any criticism gets framed in this way, it is transformed from criticism into hatred. People who criticize Israel do so because they hate Jews. Critics of Pope Francis hate clerics — and so the ontological deflection turns. The critic gets smeared; the target is turned into an innocent victim.

The fact that this particular story about Cardinal Bergoglio’s alleged complicity in the imprisonment and torture of two Jesuits priests, Franz Jalics and Orlando Yorio, has continued to churn for so many years, suggests that it has yet to be fully told.

The facts may not be clear cut because differences in accounts may hinge on differences of opinion about how to deal with the junta. Still, the new pope might do better by putting aside the shield created by the often self-serving defenders of the papacy and instead telling his own story.

Georgia Institute of Technology: Despite many remarkable discoveries in the field of neuroscience during the past several decades, researchers have not been able to fully crack the brain’s “neural code.” The neural code details how the brain’s roughly 100 billion neurons turn raw sensory inputs into information we can use to see, hear and feel things in our environment.

In a perspective article published in the journal Nature Neuroscience on Feb. 25, 2013, biomedical engineering professor Garrett Stanley detailed research progress toward “reading and writing the neural code.” This encompasses the ability to observe the spiking activity of neurons in response to outside stimuli and make clear predictions about what is being seen, heard, or felt, and the ability to artificially introduce activity within the brain that enables someone to see, hear, or feel something that is not experienced naturally through sensory organs.

Stanley also described challenges that remain to read and write the neural code and asserted that the specific timing of electrical pulses is crucial to interpreting the code. He wrote the article with support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Stanley has been developing approaches to better understand and control the neural code since 1997 and has published about 40 journal articles in this area.

“Neuroscientists have made great progress toward reading the neural code since the 1990s, but the recent development of improved tools for measuring and activating neuronal circuits has finally put us in a position to start writing the neural code and controlling neuronal circuits in a physiological and meaningful way,” said Stanley, a professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University.

With recent reports that the Obama administration is planning a decade-long scientific effort to examine the workings of the human brain and build a comprehensive map of its activity, progress toward breaking the neural code could begin to accelerate.

The potential rewards for cracking the neural code are immense. In addition to understanding how brains generate and manage information, neuroscientists may be able to control neurons in individuals with epilepsy and Parkinson’s disease or restore lost function following a brain injury. Researchers may also be able to supply artificial brain signals that provide tactile sensation to amputees wearing a prosthetic device.

Neuroscientists display a singular lack of imagination when it comes to promoting the benefits of their research. It’s always the same: we’re going to restore mobility to those who have lost it and rejuvenate damaged brains. Keep the research grants and philanthropic donations rolling in.

Still, I don’t think one has to be subject to rampant paranoia to consider less benign applications for the ability to control neural circuits.

Once the next generation of parents are comfortable with the idea of walking around with electronic devices strapped to their heads, it won’t be too difficult to persuade them that as a matter of convenience their children will be better off having computer chips implanted inside their skulls. And since it’s already become socially acceptable to use pills to change the way you feel, side-effect-free “affect reprogramming” is the next logical step.

People may still need to be engaged in soul-destroying work, but employers will be able to offer neural support systems that help workers feel satisfied even while engaged in meaningless tasks.

Welcome to the brave new world of neural engineering.

Archbishop Jorge Mario Bergoglio (now Pope Francis) drinks the local beverage, "mate," in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

“Journalists sometimes risk becoming ill from coprophilia and thus fomenting coprophagia: which is a sin that taints all men and women, that is, the tendency to focus on the negative rather than the positive aspects,” said Jorge Mario Bergoglio in an interview with Vatican Insider last month, before becoming the new pope.

Maybe the press would become less vulnerable to the charge of peddling in shit if they were better versed in Latin.

To suggest that journalists and the public harbor an unhealthy fascination with dirt is not unreasonable. No doubt many of the things that gain the most media attention would better be ignored, but the problem is less general than simply an excessive focus on the negative. More often, it involves focusing on the negative for the wrong reasons, resulting in excessive attention on trivia while overlooking matters of enduring significance.

Look, for instance, at the ‘evolution’ of Huffington Post which began its life as a reasonably decent mainstream progressive outlet and gradually turned into a kind of liberal National Inquirer. On a descending spiral in search of more traffic, journalism enslaves itself to whatever will capture readers’ interest, and in the process it further corrupts both itself and its audience.

Too rarely do editors pause to ask simple qualitative questions — is this a story about something that matters? — because their overriding concern is quantitative: it’s about counting eyeballs and dollars.

This reductive approach to news not only means that the world gets presented through a distorted lens, but also that stories get broken into easy-to-consume news nuggets. Thus the story of the election of a new pope becomes:

• New name — first Francis
• First South American pope
• First Jesuit
• Condemns inequality
• Anti-gay; anti-abortion; anti-euthanasia; anti-contraception
• Linked to junta
• Next story…

Adding a small layer of nuance, a number of quotations get tossed into the mix. For me, one stands out: “Human rights are not only violated by terrorism, repression or assassination, but also by unfair economic structures that creates huge inequalities.”

Just imagine if an American president said that! Those would be revolutionary words.

But beyond the quotes, the biographical details, the questions about possible collusion with Argentinian dictators, the quality that appears to distinguish the new pope above all others is humility.

This has been widely noted and is indeed noteworthy for many reasons. First of course is the juxtaposition of a humble character with an institutional position of unparalleled grandiosity. Will the Buenos Aires priest bring humility to the institution or will the institution corrupt the man?

Cynics will have already concluded that Pope Francis’s humble facade is just that — a cunning means for gaining power. Call me naive, but I prefer to take what I see at face value and regard these manifestations of humility as genuine — unless or until there is evidence that proves otherwise.

Yet as an atheist, why should I even have any interest in the qualities of the new pope? Isn’t he just another proponent of an unscientific view of the world that the world would be better without?

Firstly, let’s not tar all the faithful with the same brush. This isn’t a Bible-thumping anti-intellectual. Before receiving a doctorate in theology, Bergoglio gained a masters degree in chemistry and taught literature and psychology at the University of El Salvador, in Buenos Aires. While being doctrinally conservative, he is a strong advocate of social justice and appears to live in accordance with the values that he preaches.

And here’s the point: however Pope Francis might be characterized in sound-byte journalism, the degree of influence he exerts across the Catholic world will in large measure be determined by his character.

People of all faiths and no faith are inclined to form views about others — whether in direct relationships or by seeing them on TV — based as much if not more on the manner through which individuals express themselves. Viscerally we respond to bearing, facial expressions and a constellation of largely non-verbal impressions out of which we construct our sense of the person.

If the first impression of this pope — that he is a genuinely humble man — turns out to be an enduring image, then this may also be the most significant feature of his character.

But what is humility?

American culture, with its emphasis on personal freedom, individuality, self-expression, and self-made success, accords little value to a virtue associated with meekness and a lack of assertiveness. It might be called a virtue but to many American eyes humility also looks like weakness. Americans are proud to be proud — rarely esteemed for their humility.

Maybe humility could be called an un-American virtue since it eschews the exceptional; it puts others first; it connects to the earth by being rooted in common ground.

One doesn’t have to share their beliefs or endorse the power of the papacy, to nevertheless recognize that popes, no less than American presidents, have an enduring impact on the world. A pope who is a genuine expression of humility and who exerts a significant influence on the lives of about 20% of the people on this planet, has great potential as a force for good.