Heart of Gold, or Has God Turned His Back on America?

 In The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (specifically, the BBC radio version, which is the original format), Arthur Dent finds himself dragged from Earth onto a Vogon spaceship, from which he is flung into empty space, only to be rescued in the nick of time by the star-ship Heart of Gold, by a miraculous coincidence. This ship is powered by the new Infinite Improbability Drive, and because it was operating at the time at infinite improbability, the ship made the rescue all by itself. But there was one more amazing coincidence waiting for Arthur Dent when he got to the bridge of the Heart of Gold. I won't tell you what it was: you'll have to listen to the story.
Similarly, a series of coincidences happened recently which ended in a similar way. A friend from choir, named Davis, has taken up the french horn again after a gap of many years. A month ago he was at the International Horn Symposium at Ithaca College, NY when he met a fellow horn player named Barbara. They got to talking, including the standard "where are you from?". When Davis said that he was from the Norfolk area, Barbara mentioned that her son, Bill, is in Norfolk. Davis asked whether he was in the Navy--a really good guess, in general--and Barbara said that he is, and is a submariner. So Davis mentioned that he sits next to a submariner in choir, and Barbara asked the name of this submariner. After protesting that she wouldn't know him, Davis finally said "Robie ..." at which point Barbara finished his sentence "Armbruster. He's a really good friend of my son's." So they talked about me for a while, and Barbara gave Davis presents to bring to both Bill and me. I was finally able to set up a meeting at our house to make the introductions. Bill was the first to arrive, with his wife and son Ian. When Davis arrived, I started to introduce him to Bill when Ian asked Davis "what are you doing here?" The final coincidence was that Davis and Ian had been in sight-singing class together!
There have been other coincidences recently. For example, my wife decided on a whim one day to have lunch at the Norfolk Botanical Gardens and invited me to join her. There, we ran into our old Tai Chi instructor. It was almost as if it had been planned.

But the coincidence I want to write about today concerns a Tweet posted on Facebook recently by one of my friends. You can see it at right: "God has not forgotten about America, America has forgotten about God." It fits with a common theme among my more conservative friends: if America would just turn back to God, by which we really mean become more Christian, then society's ills would reduce.
By coincidence that night I read chapter 2 of Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan's book The Last Week: A Day-by-Day Account of Jesus's Final Week in Jerusalem. The book considers the final week of Jesus before his crucifixion, as told in Mark's Gospel. Borg, a noted New Testament scholar, emphasizes that the Gospels should not, in general, be fused together to give a blended picture of Jesus, as is done so often in school Nativity productions (the Magi and the shepherds do not appear together in the Bible), or in accounts of the crucifixion. Borg and Crossan are definitely on the liberal end of the spectrum, and their views on the historical Jesus are very controversial. But both are noted Jesus scholars; Borg has been esteemed as "a respectable scholar and valuable dialogue partner" who should not be ignored.
After reading this chapter, my conclusion is that it is at least equally, if not more, valid to say that:

God has turned his back on America

Profiling and the Reverend Thomas Bayes, a Lemma

Profiling can be an important tool in fighting crime. It has been the basis of several television crime drama series, including one named Profiler. And yet, we often express outrage when the police are accused of profiling. So what is the difference between Good Profiling and Bad Profiling? The answer is provided by a Presbyterian minister: the Reverend Thomas Bayes.
Here is an example of Good Profiling: for 16 years a bomber has been planting small bombs all around the city, hitting movie theaters, phone booths and other public areas. The police are at a loss, not sure what type of person they are looking for. Calling in a profiler,they find that most likely the perpetrator is unmarried, foreign, self-educated, and in his 50s. The question being answered is: given a type of crime that has been committed, what is the type of person most likely to have been responsible? This helps the police narrow their search.
Examples of bad profiling, unfortunately, abound. We need to ensure safe air travel, and the people who have most often presented security risks on airplanes recently have been of middle-eastern appearance. So when screening passengers, we pull out every person with a middle-eastern appearance, and submit them to a full-body search. Here there is a different question being asked: given that I have encountered a particular type of person, what is the probability that they have committed (or are intending to commit) a particular type of crime?
The two questions are inverses:

1. Given crime: what type of person?
2. Given type of person: is crime likely?

Let's do the numbers

We will use an imaginary city named Theoville, with demographics roughly the same as Baltimore. Theoville has 100,000 people. 63,700 of whom are black including 30,000 black men.
There are 1,000 people in jail or prison in Theoville. It's a bit of a stretch, but we can use this to assume that if we meet a random person from Theoville, there is a 1,000/100,000 = 1% chance that the person is a criminal. (It's actually a big stretch, because of the 650 people in Theoville city jail, 90%, or 585, are pre-trial--which is to say, we assume that they are innocent. The 90% pre-trial figure is the case for Baltimore city jail: see Baltimore Behind Bars, a Justice Policy Institute Report.)
Of the 1,000 people incarcerated, 770 are black men. So, if we meet a random person who is incarcerated, the probability that he is a black man is 770/1,000 = 77%. Thus people who work around the kind of Theovillians who get incarcerated see a large proportion of black male criminals. Going back to our two types of profiling questions, this is a type 1 question:

1. Given that the person I have encountered is a criminal (actually, incarcerated), what is the probability that the person is a black male? Answer: 77%.

For nerds, we can represent this symbolically. If B is the event "Black man", and C is the event "Criminal" (again, using numbers incarcerated as a substitute for criminal), then the probability that a random Theovillian is a black man given that he is a criminal can be written:

1. P(B|C) {read as "probability of the event B, given the event C} = 77%

Now, if I am wondering the streets of Theoville and encounter a black man, what is the probability that he is a criminal?

It is very easy to make the mistake of saying that it is 77%. I've known very knowledgeable people make that mistake. But remember, this is a different question from the one we asked above. We are now asking a type 2 profiling question.

2. Given that I have encountered a black man, what is the probability that he is a criminal?

Enter Bayes

This is where the Reverend Bayes comes in, because he did the mathematics to help us answer this question. We are now looking for P(C|B): the probability of the event C (meeting a criminal) given the event B (meeting a black man). Bayes Theorem states:

	P(C|B) =	P(B|C)P(C)
		P(B)

where P(C) is the probability of event C: encountering a criminal among the population of Theoville, and P(B) is the probability of event B: encountering a black man in Theoville. We already know that P(B|C) is 77%, and that P(C) is 1%. P(B)  is 30,000/100,000 = 30%, giving:

	P(C|B) =	77% x 1%	= 2.6%
		30%

There's an even easier way to calculate this: there are 770 black male criminals in Theoville, so given that we just met one of the 30,000 black men in Theoville, the probability that he is a criminal is 770/30,000 = 2.6%.
Bottom line: even though 77% of criminals are black men in Theoville, the probability that a black man I've met on the street is a criminal is 2.6%. Profiling with a type 1 question: good odds. Profiling with a type 2 question: poor odds. And if we make the mistake of confusing the two types of questions and their answers, we treat a whole group of people very unfairly.

Why a lemma?

A lemma is a subsidiary proposition introduced in proving some other theorem. It's a result that I will probably be using repeatedly. The first use will be my next post, explaining why we could argue that God has turned his back on the United States.

Hate. And humility.

It is the fourth of July. Many today will spend the day celebrating. Celebrating what? Freedom? Family? Food? Our superiority over other nations? Tonight we will re-enact scenes of violence ("and the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air") to remember the fight to gain and protect freedom.
But in reality, we in modern America have little concept of freedom because we have so little memory of what it is like not to be free. (This omits, of course, the ridiculous number of Americans--disproportionately African-American--whom we incarcerate.) There was one American, however, who did understand.

Elie Wiesel. Credit AP.

Two days ago, Elie Wiesel died, at age 87. At age 15, he was sent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. His father, mother, and sister died in the Holocaust. His experiences during this time are told in his book Night, the first in a trilogy. From the time of the Holocaust Wiesel was stateless, until he became a U.S. citizen in 1963. He is best known for his untiring work to keep alive the memory of the Holocaust, in order to prevent recurrence of such repression and racism. After being award the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, he and his wife established the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity to continue that work.
I'm sorry to say that until recently I knew very little about Elie Wiesel. I've not got around to reading Night yet. To prepare to write about him today, I consulted his wonderful obituary in Haaretz. On learning of his death, and preparing for our Sunday School lesson on humility, I decided to delve briefly into his writings. One of the functions of the Elie Wiesel Foundation has been to organize international conferences on "The Anatomy of Hate." In his memoir And the Sea Is Never Full, Wiesel writes (p. 369):

"Hate," the key word, describes the passions, often contradictory and always vile, that have torn and ravaged the twentieth century. Only the twentieth century? In truth, the word contains and illustrates the full recorded memory of human cruelty and suffering. Cain hated his brother and killed him, thus the first death in history was a murder. Since then, hate and death have not ceased to rage.

Hate—racial, tribal, religious, ancestral, national, social, ethical, political, economic, ideological—in itself represents the inexorable defeat of mankind, its absolute defeat. If there is an area in which mankind cannot claim the slightest progress, this surely is it. It does not take much for human beings, collectively or individually, to suddenly one day pit themselves like wild beasts one against the other, their worst instincts laid bare, in a state of deleterious exaltation. One decision, one simple word, and a family or a community will drown in blood or perish in flames.

Why is there so much violence, so much hate? How is it conceived, transmitted, fertilized, nurtured? As we face the disquieting, implacable rise of intolerance and fanaticism on more than one continent, it is our duty to expose the danger. By naming it. By confronting it.

Powerful words. Worth reading again, and after doing so I would like us—including you, gentle reader—to engage in an exercise. It is easy to picture the other fanatics, the ones who hate us. Instead, I  would like us to focus on our own hate. Whom do we hate? Hillary Clinton? Donald Trump? Nigel Farage? Sadiq Khan? "Libtards"? Fanatical Conservatives? Gays? Gay-bashers? Muslims? Christians? Hindus? Sikhs?
Think about it: whom do you hate?

Go ahead. I'll wait.