Spiritual decay predicted again. Yawn.

John Kass, as is his wont, used his column in the Chicago Tribune to express moral dudgeon that there's more than a few people out there that don't agree with his views on The Spiritual Crisis of Our Times (which is a nice way of saying A Growing Abandonment of Organized Religion) and apparently decided to enlist the help of Rod Dreher from The American Conservative to drive home the dull point of his column. This would be more of a point of boredom for me than anything else (after all, how do you argue with a man who was taken seriously by - wait for it - Glenn Beck?), but Michael Miner's retort in the Reader is worth looking over. An excerpt:

I suppose Kass and Dreher have put their finger on something, but they are willfully blind to something else. They are blind to why (beyond fashionability) so many Americans describe themselves—on dating sites, say—as "spiritual, not religious." They're blind to why a friend of mine is so spiritually curious that he's crossed the Pacific to attend a Buddhist retreat and has joined a Bible study group, yet describes himself as agnostic. And why I have no quarrel with either the idea of absolute truths or with the idea those truths help identify something that can be called evil.

I'm sure that the confusion of Kass, Dreher or both wouldn't be solved by the fact that there are nearly as many gradations of unbelief (or at least questioning of it) as there are interpretations of Christianity, Judaism, Islam or any other religion that comes to mind. Note that the friend that Miner mentions above seems quite open to any number of different experiences, religious or otherwise. I suppose that Kass and Dreher would be just as aghast concerning religious syncretism as they would by anything else they decry,

.And hey, even Kass' old buddy Weepy seems to have chosen Mormonism for his own, predictably odd reasons.,

But that's not worth a column in the Trib, now, is it?

News of actual significance, for once

Earlier in the week, there was some degree of confusion as to whether CERN had actually discovered the Higgs Boson (or the "God particle", if you so choose); apparently, they did:

We observe in our data clear signs of a new particle, at the level of 5 sigma, in the mass region around 126 GeV. The outstanding performance of the LHC and ATLAS and the huge efforts of many people have brought us to this exciting stage,” said ATLAS experiment spokesperson Fabiola Gianotti, “but a little more time is needed to prepare these results for publication.”

"The results are preliminary but the 5 sigma signal at around 125 GeV we’re seeing is dramatic. This is indeed a new particle. We know it must be a boson and it’s the heaviest boson ever found,” said CMS experiment spokesperson Joe Incandela. “The implications are very significant and it is precisely for this reason that we must be extremely diligent in all of our studies and cross-checks."

“It’s hard not to get excited by these results,” said CERN Research Director Sergio Bertolucci. “ We stated last year that in 2012 we would either find a new Higgs-like particle or exclude the existence of the Standard Model Higgs. With all the necessary caution, it looks to me that we are at a branching point: the observation of this new particle indicates the path for the future towards a more detailed understanding of what we’re seeing in the data.”

(Also on Lurker)