FROM RABBI RICHARD ADDRESS, UNION FOR REFORM JUDAISM: At a recent workshop that I was teaching on “The Art of Caregiving,” a participant and I meandered into a conversation about his recent retirement. He had worked at the same job for decades and was not quite used to his new stage of life. During a break, he asked to follow up on some of the workshop discussion on meaning. The group and I had been talking about the writings of Abraham Joshua Heschel, who described human beings as creatures “in search of meaning” and emphasized the power of being needed in the world. As this 60-ish man stirred his coffee, he turned to me, looked me straight in the eye, and said: “That is the issue, rabbi, no one needs me now.”
I was struck by his honesty, and also, the comment touched me in a very profound way. What a lonely place it must seem to reach a stage in life and feel that you are no longer needed. What is it like to wake up every morning and look into a day in which you see no reason to get out of bed? Herein lies one of the challenges that will impact increasing numbers of people: With the longevity revolution now upon us, one of our more interesting discussions as a society and as individuals will be how to live our expanded lives with a sense of meaning and purpose. In an age of science and technology, the voice of religion must also be present in this search for meaning. Indeed, the impact and contributions of science and technology can be the means through which people engage in finding a sense of meaning; yet, the search is, by definition, an individual one and subject to increasing variables, such as health, family circumstances, and economic pressures. For many right now, the luxury of one’s search for meaning may be back-burnered by the necessity of having to work an extra job or postpone retirement so as to boost a floundering pension or 401K.
Every one of us wants to live a life that has meaning—I believe that completely—but meaning in one’s life cannot be scientifically measured. It is more a feeling, a sense, an emotion that what I do and who I am counts for something and contributes to a legacy of life. Often, like the gentleman at my workshop, we define that meaning through our work. “I am a dentist”, or “I am a teacher." And what happens when that definition is removed? We are given the challenge of really finding an answer to our own predicate. This can be frightening and empowering, daunting and liberating, all at the same time. For in our society and our schools, we rarely educate for meaning. Rather, we educate for tasks.
Here, then, is a major challenge for religion in the coming years. Really, it is the same challenge that we have faced for centuries. How do we educate people for meaning? How do we teach that this life is a gift and that it is our charge to live it so that it has meaning and provides a legacy that can be lived through future generations? Religion has too often been corrupted by fanatical fundamentalism that uses God as a reason to promote political agendas. In doing so, the search for personal meaning is abandoned and subverted. In this age of growing angst and personal questioning, it is time for the leaders of religious communities to affirm the basic call of their faiths. Heschel is right, we are “creatures in search of meaning,” and too many of us now wander in our own wilderness in search of that “holy grail.”

Back in March, we told you about the Vatican's plans to erect a statue of Galileo in its gardens—both to mark the 400th anniversary of his telescope and to help fully rehabilitate his image. (After the Catholic Church charged the astronomer with heresy, he was forced to recant his scientific view of heliocentrism—the idea that the Earth revolved around the sun—during his 1633 trial.)
Now, it seems the plan for the statue is on hold, indefinitely. Monsignor Gianfranco Ravasi, head of the Pontifical Council for Culture, told The Times that the statue had "only been an idea," which is now "suspended"—though Galileo "deserves all our appreciation and gratitude."
Galileo, Ravasi said in a statement, can now be recognized "as a believer who, in the context of his time, sought to reconcile the results of his scientific researches with his Christian faith." And "the church wishes to honor the figure of Galileo—innovative genius and son of the church," with a number of initiatives this year.
But the statue is no longer one of them. According to Ravasi, the statue had been designed, and a mold had been made, but the Vatican asked the project's sponsor to divert the funds to projects in Nigeria and other places "to foster a better understanding of the relationship between science and religion." —Heather Wax

According to a new brain-imaging study, it's possible to feel empathy for another person's pain even if you've never actually experienced that pain yourself. The study, led by Nicolas Danziger of the department of clinical neurophysiology and the Pain Center at the Pitie-Salpetriere hospital in Paris, focused on patients who have congenital insensitivity to pain, a disorder that prevents them from feeling pain themselves. Previously, Danziger showed that these patients tend to underestimate the pain of others when they don't have emotional cues—"unless the observer is endowed with sufficient emphatic abilities to fully acknowledge the suffering experience of others in spite of his own insensitivity."
In this study, the researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging to look at the brain activity of these patients when they were asked to imagine the feelings of a person in photo that showed the person's body parts in painful situations or facial expression of pain. They showed less activity than control subjects did in their brains' visual regions—indicating reduced emotional arousal to seeing another's pain—but, unlike the control subjects, they showed activation of brain regions involved in emotion. While they can't rely on past experiences of feeling pain, they seem to rely on their empathetic abilities to imagine the pain of others.
"Our findings," the researchers write, "underline the major role of midline structures in emotional perspective taking and in the ability to understand someone else's feelings despite the lack of any previous personal experience of it—an empathetic challenge frequently raised during human social interactions." —Heather Wax

FROM RICHARD SWINBURNE, EMERITUS NOLLOTH PROFESSOR OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION AT THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD: The existence of pain and suffering and other forms of evil is the strongest argument against the existence of God. God is supposed to be omnipotent and perfectly good. But, being omnipotent, he could remove all the evil from the world; and being perfectly good, he would surely seek to do so. So, the argument concludes, there is no God.
However, God's omnipotence is only supposed to be the power to do anything that is logically possible to do—so, for example, he cannot make me exist and not exist at the same time; he cannot do the logically impossible because it makes no sense to suppose he could. And a perfectly good being may well allow evil to occur if that is the only way this being could promote a great good. So God may well allow evil to occur if, without allowing the evil to occur, it is not logically possible for him to promote some great good.
Much of the evil in the world is caused by the actions of human beings, who cause it deliberately or allow it to occur through negligence. Given that humans have free will, it is not logically possible for God to allow humans to choose whether or not to cause or allow evil and yet ensure that they always choose not to. And it is a great good for human beings to be responsible for each other. You can only really be responsible for someone if it is within your power to give that person either a good life or a bad life; if God had given you only the power to determine what kind of good life came to somebody else, it wouldn't really matter what you did. But isn't it hard on the other person, who is thus dependent on you?
Not necessarily. Suffering provides a great opportunity in how one chooses to cope with it—either by feeling sorry for oneself or by showing patience and courage. Each good choice we make makes it easier to make a good choice the next time, and each bad choice makes it easier to make a bad choice next time. Therefore, our actions are not merely good or bad in virtue of their immediate effects on others but also in virtue of their effects on our own character. Obviously, not all evils are caused or allowed by humans; there are the evils caused by accidents and diseases that are currently unpreventable by humans. Yet without these, we could argue, humans would have relatively little opportunity for character formation.
So, the religious defense against the problem of evil is that evil provides great opportunities for free and responsible choice and character formation that would otherwise not be available to us. Of course, God would be mad to cause endless evils in order to give us endless such opportunities. And if there is a God, that’s not what happens. Only for the limited period of our earthly life are there such opportunities, but with them we can form a character suitable for another life.

Richard Swinburne appears with Quentin Smith, Michael Tooley, Alvin Plantinga, and Peter van Inwagen in "Does Evil Disprove God?" the 21st episode in the Closer to Truth: Cosmos, Consciousness, God TV series, hosted and created by Robert Lawrence Kuhn. The series airs Thursdays on the PBS HD network and many other PBS stations. Every Friday, participants will share their views on the previous day's episode.

Stanford University has launched a Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education—and it comes with a 150,000 dollar donation from the Dalai Lama, "the largest sum he has ever given for a scientific venture," according to the school.
The center, which is co-directed by Dr. Jim Doty, a neurosurgeon, and Dr. William Mobley, a neurologist, both at the Stanford School of Medicine, has already raised more than 2 million dollars and begun a number of pilot studies looking at the neurological basis of feelings like compassion and suffering.
The researchers hope to use their findings to improve people's lives—increasing compassion among children, parents, clergy, and hospital personnel; decreasing violence and recidivism among prison inmates; and reducing depression and anxiety among corporate workers. "As a neurosurgeon, I can only affect a few patients each day," says Doty. "Through the activities of the center, we have the potential to impact thousands to millions of people to live fuller and more positive lives."

It looks like happiness levels are evening out across the American population. According to a new study by University of Pennsylvania economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, the gap between the happy and the unhappy—what researchers call "happiness inequality"—has become much smaller over the last few decades. "The U.S. population as a whole is not getting happier," Stevenson says. "For every unhappy person who became happier, there's someone on the other side coming down."
The researchers looked at data collected from 1972 to 2006 through the University of Chicago's General Social Survey and found that the happiness gap between white and nonwhites narrowed by two-thirds; whites are slightly less happy, and nonwhites are significantly happier. The gap between men and women narrowed, too. Men are a little happier, while women are less happy. There is one area, however—education level—where the gap continues to grow: People with a college degree are happier than they were in the early 1970s, while those without a college education have become less happy.
But overall, "Americans are becoming more similar to each other in terms of reported happiness," says Stevenson. "It's an interesting finding because other research shows increasing gaps in income, consumption, and leisure time." —Heather Wax

FROM ENTERTAINMENT REPORTER KIMBERLY ROOTS: In the suburb of Springfield, Massachusetts, a teenager is on the phone while sitting in front of his computer. A pop-up window appears on screen with the headline, “What was that noise?” and prompts him to click on a button. He does, and as he ends his phone conversation, a series of blurry videos begin streaming on his screen. They look like the lost reel of The Blair Witch Project, and they sound like it, too—lots of screaming and spooky noises. His mom ducks her head in to tell him she and his father are going out, and because she’s used to the uncommunicative nature of teen boys, she doesn’t think it’s weird when he doesn’t respond. His back is to her, so she can’t see that he’s transfixed by the video, tears streaming down his face, mouth agape. She leaves. A hand morphs out from the screen reaches toward the boy and eventually grabs on to his skull. That'll teach him to install Pop-Up Blocker.
At Walter’s Harvard lab, we hear him loudly denounce Darwin’s theory of evolution while Peter opens an envelope addressed to his dad. Astrid notices him read it and toss it in the garbage as Olivia calls to say the computer boy—Greg—is dead and his body will arrive at the lab shortly. While the Bishops go out to meet it, Astrid sneakily retrieves the balled-up letter from the trash. After Greg is laid out for an autopsy, Walter announces that the teen’s brain has completely liquefied … and Peter barely hides his disgust as he drains the gray matter into a beaker. Astrid, who we learn has a background in computer science, examines the hard drive that Greg’s parents gave Olivia and deems it fried. While she gives it another look, Olivia travels to an auto repair shop to talk to Luke, who was chatting with Greg the night before. Luke is surprised by the news of Greg’s death and tells Olivia that they’d been friends since their dads worked together years before. Just then, Peter calls. There’s been another victim.
The second guy died at the car dealership where he worked and exhibits the same symptoms as Greg: brains leaking from the ears, nose, and mouth. Ew. The dead man, Anton, died in front of his computer, too. Astrid looks at Anton’s hard drive, which is corrupted in the same way that Greg’s is, and realizes that both downloaded a gigantic file before the drives crashed. Peter takes both pieces of hardware to one of his unsavory contacts, leaving Astrid to share the trashed note with Olivia, who looks shocked.
Peter’s contact, Hakim, isn’t happy to see him. But when Peter produces a gold coin that seems to have meaning to both of them, Hakim warms up. He locks on to the file that both victims downloaded and is amazed at the complicated way it’s been bounced around the world. He can’t tell where it originates, but he can tell that it’s being downloaded right now … in Olivia’s apartment! Cut to Olivia’s place, where her niece, Ella, is playing on a laptop. Peter calls Olivia and both race to her apartment, where Ella clicks on the pop-up and the bizarre video begins to play. Her mom, Rachel, is cooking and isn’t aware that Olivia’s frantically calling or that a digitized hand is reaching out of the laptop screen toward her daughter’s head. Olivia busts in, guns blazing, and the video abruptly shuts down. Peter’s close behind. Ella is catatonic for a moment, then comes around and asks when Olivia got home. Later, Peter plays with Ella and flirts with Rachel. Suddenly, Ella remembers the hand, prompting Olivia to take a closer look at the laptop. She notices the built-in camera is activated … and we cut to a dank basement where a man stares at a computer screen that’s receiving the signal from Olivia’s laptop. He mocks her inability to comprehend what’s going on—but then quickly shuts down the screen when someone approaches his workshop. Turns out, it’s his son … who’s also Greg’s friend, Luke. It becomes clear that Luke has no idea what his dad is up to, but he’s wary about why anyone not in The Matrix would need that many computers in one place. All he’ll say is that he’s working on a new program.
In Evanston, Illinois, a woman comes home to find her day trader husband dead at his computer, soupy brains all over the place. At Harvard, Walter’s figured out what’s going on but Astrid puts it in plain language: “It’s like a computer virus that infects people.” Outside, Peter has a tense conversation with an older woman who wants to see Walter. He won’t allow it. Olivia later confronts him about the letter, which was from the woman, and exposits that she’s the mother of the lab assistant that died in a fire at Walter’s lab 20 years before. (Her death, by the way, was the crime for which Walter was found guilty and imprisoned.) Peter doesn’t think Walter can handle talking with the grieving mom; Olivia does. Astrid interrupts to say that the newest victim married Miriam Dempsey, Luke’s mom, a year ago. Olivia and the gang eventually figure out that Luke’s dad, Brian, worked as an advanced computer programmer for Greg’s dad until he was fired. They bring Luke in for questioning, but after Sanford Harris forces Olivia to come down hard on the teen, the boy demands a lawyer and clams up. When he’s released, however, he runs right to his dad’s workshop, where Olivia finds Brian watching his own program and slowly losing what’s left of his mind. He holds a gun under his chin and, after a few moments, kills himself.
At the FBI, Phillip Broyles sticks up for Olivia and tells Harris that if he wants to take her down, he’s going to have to go through him. At Harvard, Peter brings the lab assistant’s mom to see Walter, who handles the situation with compassion and empathy. And later that night at Olivia’s apartment, the doorbell rings: It’s a slightly tipsy Peter, who apologizes to Olivia and says she was right about Walter after all.
THE BOTTOM LINE: The “ghost in the machine” concept—illustrated here by the computer virus that’s too effective for mankind’s own good—originated with Gilbert Ryle’s take on Descartes mind-body concept and gained even wider notoriety with Arthur Koestler’s book of the same title. Koestler argued that humans have a propensity for self-destruction. The virus in this episode, had it gotten out of control (like most viruses do), might’ve given humanity a little push in Koestler’s direction.