No kidding! In an amazing moment of clarity, Pat Robertson declares that Islam is in reality an ideology motivated by political power.
Of course, this is not news to most of us. Organized religion is an irrational ideology with political aims (what else could it be? legitimate theology?) and because it's built on vapor, it has better-than-average B.S. There are lots of American social conservatives freaking out about Islam at the moment. The obvious challenge to Robertson while he's having his insight seizure: how is Islam different from Christianity in this regard?
And a challenge to atheists: is Islam actually worse? Why or why not? On what basis?
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
What's Your Theory For? Or, Why It Matters
View Larger Map
Mt. St. Helens is, to put it mildly, cool. I personally appreciate the view from the still-devastated area southeast of the mountain, where the arrow is in the map above; below is a picture of it from that vantage point (and yes, that is smoke from the mountain).
The hike up to the crater rim is essentially a class 3 scramble most of the way, and dusty, and annoying. At the caldera rim you are rewarded with unpleasant hot fumes, and you wonder legitimately what got in your head to make you do this.
When you're driving back west toward I-5 on Route 504, if you're paying attention, you'll see that someone has helpfully placed at the end of their driveway some pamphlets showing how St. Helens proves that the world was made in six days. You see, in a single day, the mountain changed shape, and new valleys and lakes were formed. Proof!
This is interesting, because from creationists we typically don't hear a lot about mountains and plate tectonics. You might read this and think, wait a second - I thought finding a watch on a beach was proof that the watch was designed, because the dead mineral material the beach is made of was not designed?
Indeed, the question is why does the creationist insistence on design in nature stop with living things? Why do creationists have this obsession with clotting cascades and eyes, and with people? No one from this camp ever seems to be too interested in viral evolution, until it impacts human sexual behavior. So if the whole world was created, why isn't there evidence of design in the arrangement of every last damn one of those boulders you have to scramble up on Mt. St. Helens, or for that matter the bushes in the canyon behind my house? Okay, so those have changed since 4,004 BC; how about the rocks on yet-unclimbed peaks exposed above the glaciers in Greenland? Why isn't there evidence of design in every last grain of sand in its little proper place? Why is it always living things they're so worried about?
Creationists, I'm trying to help you here. If you took your own theory seriously, these are the kinds of questions you would be asking.
But let's agree to disagree, creationists. Let's have another discussion, one that's about the discussion. Let's ask each other why we each take the positions we do. I'll go first. I take increasing happiness and eliminating suffering to be an end in itself. This influences my decision to become professionally trained to specifically eliminate disease-based suffering. Treating disease means understanding biology, and I have encountered no principle in biology better evidence-supported or more unifying than evolution. So, yes, if a biology theory came along tomorrow that helps eliminate disease suffering more effectively than evolution, I'm out the evolution-door that minute.
To this end, there are two things that could help us understand your point of view:
1) What, exactly, are creationists worried would happen if tomorrow everyone in the world accepted evolution as the best account of how things got to be this way? Why the concern?
2) Looking at handful of creationists with academic science positions - where are the advances based on your theory? Where is the medicine? How is creation science making the world better? Why don't the pharmaceutical companies see past the (apparently) leftist propaganda brainwashing machine of academic science and build their research on creationism?
Friday, October 30, 2009
The History of Creationism
The following is taken from P-Zed's summary of Ron Numbers's history of creationism in the U.S. (a must-read).
One kind of theist is often eager to reject the claims of other theists. This is perhaps why Mitt Romney is not the President of the United States right now (for example). Exploit this. Remind them that it was only the Seventh Day Adventists who supported Young Earth Creationism until the 60s. Are they Seventh Day Adventists? Why are they following SDA doctrine?
The mainstreaming of literalist creationism occurred in the 1960s, when John Whitcomb and Henry Morris wrote The Genesis Flood. It's basically the same nonsense he Seventh Day Adventists were peddling, but Whitcomb and Morris were not SDAs, making it possible for conservative Christians, who regarded Seventh Day Adventism as a freaky cult, to coalesce in the formation of the Creation Research Society. These people had no ambition to convert the research community, but instead wanted to wean bible-believers away from what they considered the compromises of day-age and gap theory.
One kind of theist is often eager to reject the claims of other theists. This is perhaps why Mitt Romney is not the President of the United States right now (for example). Exploit this. Remind them that it was only the Seventh Day Adventists who supported Young Earth Creationism until the 60s. Are they Seventh Day Adventists? Why are they following SDA doctrine?
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Support Ken Miller - See Him at USD Friday 30 October
Find a theist. Talk to them about evolution. Offer them the following deals:
a) Evolution is how we got here.
b) Evolution is how we got here, and if you accept it you have to stop believing in God.
Guess which deal they'll take? Based on simple logic, which is more likely to succeed, the deal with one condition, or the deal with two?
Ken Miller was a major part (if not the main part) of the NCSE's testimony in the Dover evolution case. He also happens to be Catholic, which confuses some atheists.
But not this atheist. At least on evolution, Miller is a heavyweight in the corner of separation of church and state, and reason in general, and I'm happy we have him. As someone who is simultaneously a theist and strongly pro-evolution, he can influence minds that dismiss atheists out of hand. Religion is a social mode of "thinking", and he is after all one of them. Just look at his review of Ben Stein's Expelled in the Boston Globe. Miller is speaking on the USD Campus at 7:30 this Friday 30 October, Shiley Theatre in Camino Hall. I'm going to try to make it. Highly recommended.
(For out-of-towners, that's University of San Diego, NOT UC San Diego.)
a) Evolution is how we got here.
b) Evolution is how we got here, and if you accept it you have to stop believing in God.
Guess which deal they'll take? Based on simple logic, which is more likely to succeed, the deal with one condition, or the deal with two?
Ken Miller was a major part (if not the main part) of the NCSE's testimony in the Dover evolution case. He also happens to be Catholic, which confuses some atheists.
But not this atheist. At least on evolution, Miller is a heavyweight in the corner of separation of church and state, and reason in general, and I'm happy we have him. As someone who is simultaneously a theist and strongly pro-evolution, he can influence minds that dismiss atheists out of hand. Religion is a social mode of "thinking", and he is after all one of them. Just look at his review of Ben Stein's Expelled in the Boston Globe. Miller is speaking on the USD Campus at 7:30 this Friday 30 October, Shiley Theatre in Camino Hall. I'm going to try to make it. Highly recommended.
(For out-of-towners, that's University of San Diego, NOT UC San Diego.)
Religion as Social Intelligence
If you're not yet convinced that the term "God" is a semantically meaningless but socially useful mouth-noise that functions as a costlier-than-normal speech signal that you obey a certain moral authority, then read this and then come back. Here's the Wired version. An earlier paper by Kapogiannis (the lead author here) was cited by Sam Harris's fMRI paper earlier this month.
Before we atheists get all self-congratulatory, there's a strong message in this for us. There's the first point that yes, of course this isn't proof of the god-as-signaling-noise argument, but it is one more very relevant fact to add to the Bayesian pile, and besides correlation does not equal causation in any direction here. Religion is propagated and sustained largely through social behaviors, which is why "arguments" with strong theists tend to run in circles. It's never and cannot be about coherent arguments; try to talk to an academic theologian (an elite, professional propositional theist) and you find out very quickly that even the supposed experts fall apart at a touch. It's always been about "My dad told me this, and you're an outsider so you feel wrong to me, so I'm going to do whatever have to to avoid cognitive dissonance about this idea (signaling behavior) of 'God'". This usual means defending it from any kind of discussion.
But there's a far more important point that should keep us from patting ourselves on the back. Religion has been successful in large part because they're good at social organization. They're friendlier when a new member or visitor walks in the door, they show up to bake sales on time, and honor their social commitments with alarming frequency. What are we going to do about it?
Both theists and atheists: don't tell me that if I scold other atheists for not showing up to bake sales on time that we've become just like a religion. Or I'll throw you off the internet.
Before we atheists get all self-congratulatory, there's a strong message in this for us. There's the first point that yes, of course this isn't proof of the god-as-signaling-noise argument, but it is one more very relevant fact to add to the Bayesian pile, and besides correlation does not equal causation in any direction here. Religion is propagated and sustained largely through social behaviors, which is why "arguments" with strong theists tend to run in circles. It's never and cannot be about coherent arguments; try to talk to an academic theologian (an elite, professional propositional theist) and you find out very quickly that even the supposed experts fall apart at a touch. It's always been about "My dad told me this, and you're an outsider so you feel wrong to me, so I'm going to do whatever have to to avoid cognitive dissonance about this idea (signaling behavior) of 'God'". This usual means defending it from any kind of discussion.
But there's a far more important point that should keep us from patting ourselves on the back. Religion has been successful in large part because they're good at social organization. They're friendlier when a new member or visitor walks in the door, they show up to bake sales on time, and honor their social commitments with alarming frequency. What are we going to do about it?
Both theists and atheists: don't tell me that if I scold other atheists for not showing up to bake sales on time that we've become just like a religion. Or I'll throw you off the internet.
Spot the Difference: Drunk Driving and Vaccine Refusal
What could Paul Offit have done to bring all this about?
Abortion provider? Evolutionary biologist? On the board of a commission that said yes, we really did land on the moon or no, Bush wasn't behind 9/11?
No, Paul Offit is a pediatrician who invented a vaccine. But he's evil; Jim Carrey said so. When did Carrey buy a ticket to Tom Cruise-land? And why do these conspiracy theories make people behave the same way?
If you're not already scared:
Here's a talking point: if you run across one of these mental giants, ask them to clarify the moral difference between people who choose not to vaccinate their kids, and people who choose to drink and drive. In either case, your own kid probably won't get sick (or killed). You might also ask them explain exactly how is not vaccinating your kids different from poor parenting? Oh, it makes them cry? Guess what, so does the first day of school. Sorry, you're just a bad mom or dad. Wipe their tears and tell them it's for their own good, and stop avoiding difficult choices. This one's really not all that hard. I'm not speaking rhetorically: if you run into one of these people on-line or in person, ask them. Somebody has to.
So here's one way to score a point for reason: speak up to support vaccinations and your local healthcare providers. Your own health depends on it. For my part, I'll be getting the H1N1 vaccine next week!
Offit once got an email from a Seattle man that read, "I will hang you by your neck until you are dead!" Other bracing messages include "You have blood on your hands" and "Your day of reckoning will come." A few years ago, a man on the phone ominously told Offit he knew where the doctor's two children went to school. At a meeting of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an anti-vaccine protester emerged from a crowd of people holding signs that featured Offit's face emblazoned with the word terrorist and grabbed the unsuspecting, 6-foot-tall physician by the jacket.
"I don't think he wanted to hurt me," Offit recalls. "He was just excited to be close to the personification of such evil." Still, whenever Offit gets a letter with an unfamiliar return address, he holds the envelope at arm's length before gingerly tearing it open. "I think about it," he admits. "Anthrax."
Abortion provider? Evolutionary biologist? On the board of a commission that said yes, we really did land on the moon or no, Bush wasn't behind 9/11?
No, Paul Offit is a pediatrician who invented a vaccine. But he's evil; Jim Carrey said so. When did Carrey buy a ticket to Tom Cruise-land? And why do these conspiracy theories make people behave the same way?
If you're not already scared:
In certain parts of the US, vaccination rates have dropped so low that occurrences of some children’s diseases are approaching pre-vaccine levels for the first time ever. And the number of people who choose not to vaccinate their children (so-called philosophical exemptions are available in about 20 states, including Pennsylvania, Texas, and much of the West) continues to rise. In states where such opting out is allowed, 2.6 percent of parents did so last year, up from 1 percent in 1991, according to the CDC. In some communities, like California’s affluent Marin County, just north of San Francisco, non-vaccination rates are approaching 6 percent (counterintuitively, higher rates of non-vaccination often correspond with higher levels of education and wealth).
That may not sound like much, but a recent study by the Los Angeles Times indicates that the impact can be devastating. The Times found that even though only about 2 percent of California’s kindergartners are unvaccinated (10,000 kids, or about twice the number as in 1997), they tend to be clustered, disproportionately increasing the risk of an outbreak of such largely eradicated diseases as measles, mumps, and pertussis (whooping cough). The clustering means almost 10 percent of elementary schools statewide may already be at risk.
Here's a talking point: if you run across one of these mental giants, ask them to clarify the moral difference between people who choose not to vaccinate their kids, and people who choose to drink and drive. In either case, your own kid probably won't get sick (or killed). You might also ask them explain exactly how is not vaccinating your kids different from poor parenting? Oh, it makes them cry? Guess what, so does the first day of school. Sorry, you're just a bad mom or dad. Wipe their tears and tell them it's for their own good, and stop avoiding difficult choices. This one's really not all that hard. I'm not speaking rhetorically: if you run into one of these people on-line or in person, ask them. Somebody has to.
So here's one way to score a point for reason: speak up to support vaccinations and your local healthcare providers. Your own health depends on it. For my part, I'll be getting the H1N1 vaccine next week!
Thursday, October 22, 2009
California's Own Creationism "Museum"
It was only a matter of time. I couldn't resist. Today I finally swung by the Creation and Earth History Museum, in Santee, California. I knew it would be closed but I wanted to bask in teh crazy (Oklahoma doesn't get it all).
First question: any SoCal atheists interested in a mass visit much like Ken Ham's roadside attraction experienced this summer? I realize there are argument for and against, but come on - it seemed like they had a lot of fun.
Observation: the "museum" is in an office-park area, and in fact shares its building with Scantibodies. I thought to myself, I wonder how a biotech/diagnostics company (guessing from the name) feels about sharing its building with these guys? They feel just fine, as it turns out. Scantibodies owner Tom Cantor is the one who gives the space to the museum; apparently he's close with Ken Ham.
I wonder why Cantor doesn't advertise that he's afiliated with a creationism museum? I wonder what the impact would be on his business if this were better known?
First question: any SoCal atheists interested in a mass visit much like Ken Ham's roadside attraction experienced this summer? I realize there are argument for and against, but come on - it seemed like they had a lot of fun.
Observation: the "museum" is in an office-park area, and in fact shares its building with Scantibodies. I thought to myself, I wonder how a biotech/diagnostics company (guessing from the name) feels about sharing its building with these guys? They feel just fine, as it turns out. Scantibodies owner Tom Cantor is the one who gives the space to the museum; apparently he's close with Ken Ham.
I wonder why Cantor doesn't advertise that he's afiliated with a creationism museum? I wonder what the impact would be on his business if this were better known?
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Ray Comfort Coming to the University of San Diego?
Yes! Ray Comfort! Banana-man himself!
He's going to be handing out copies of his hilarious yet comical annotated version of Origin of the Species. (Note to Ray: do you know how many people, even atheists, have actually read that book? For my part, I skimmed it in high school.)
I'd hate to think he'd be lonely or bored while he's here. After all, as a relative newcomer to San Diego myself, perhaps I can bond with him. Maybe we can go out for a beer, or whatever he's allowed to drink.
If you're in San Diego and you want to help greet Mr. Comfort, drop me a line or leave a comment. If you believe in evolution and you're religious, you're still more than welcome. I mean it! This is a guy who wants to stultify American education.
He's going to be handing out copies of his hilarious yet comical annotated version of Origin of the Species. (Note to Ray: do you know how many people, even atheists, have actually read that book? For my part, I skimmed it in high school.)
I'd hate to think he'd be lonely or bored while he's here. After all, as a relative newcomer to San Diego myself, perhaps I can bond with him. Maybe we can go out for a beer, or whatever he's allowed to drink.
If you're in San Diego and you want to help greet Mr. Comfort, drop me a line or leave a comment. If you believe in evolution and you're religious, you're still more than welcome. I mean it! This is a guy who wants to stultify American education.
Saturday, October 17, 2009
The Word of God and Who Else?
Having a direct channel to Truth makes life simple. Many Christians believe that the Bible is the word of God. Well, and the guys who knew Jesus and wrote the New Testament. And some who never met Jesus; in fact, they (Paul) wrote most of the New Testament. Well, and the Roman Emperor Constantine, who put together a committee three centuries after Christ's life to decide what essays should get tossed, and what he as the Emperor thought was good enough to stay. Well, and also the translators from Hebrew and Greek to English, whoever, whenever and wherever they were. And this whole body of secondary literature of people alive right now who are editing it, and plus your minister or priest or pastor, who knows better than all of them. Simple!
The Reception of Ardi in the Middle East
Interesting Economist article which it links poor Arab education to bad Arab economies. Turns out there is a direct conflict between faith and national strength. "In much of the Arab world, coverage of the research took a different spin. 'American Scientists Debunk Darwin', exclaimed the headline in al-Masry al-Youm, Egypt’s leading independent daily. 'Ardi Refutes Darwin’s Theory', chimed the website of al-Jazeera, the region’s most-watched television channel."
And later:
"...Saudi Arabia has launched King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), a city-sized institution with an endowment of $20 billion. Intended as an oasis of academic excellence, it enjoys an independent board and is the kingdom’s only co-educational institution. This augurs well for the Saudi elite, but one fancy new university will do little to lift the overall standard of Saudi education. And it has been attacked by religious conservatives. A senior cleric who decried the mixing of sexes at KAUST, declaring that its textbooks should be reviewed by religious scholars, was forced to resign from government office."
And later:
"...Saudi Arabia has launched King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), a city-sized institution with an endowment of $20 billion. Intended as an oasis of academic excellence, it enjoys an independent board and is the kingdom’s only co-educational institution. This augurs well for the Saudi elite, but one fancy new university will do little to lift the overall standard of Saudi education. And it has been attacked by religious conservatives. A senior cleric who decried the mixing of sexes at KAUST, declaring that its textbooks should be reviewed by religious scholars, was forced to resign from government office."
Friday, October 16, 2009
How Would Living Things Be Different If...
...they were intelligently designed by (non-divine) aliens, as opposed to a deity of some kind? Why is it not possible to confuse divine design with alien engineering? Why can't the intelligent designer just be a Martian?
A (serious!) question for ID proponents, of course. A good way to see the flaws in an argument is to take it more seriously than its own adherents do.
[Added 39 minutes later after running across it on Pharyngula: see below.]
A (serious!) question for ID proponents, of course. A good way to see the flaws in an argument is to take it more seriously than its own adherents do.
[Added 39 minutes later after running across it on Pharyngula: see below.]
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
The Neural Correlates of Persuasion
It turns out you can literally see someone changing his or her mind. An in-press fMRI study investigates cross-cultural neural activity in the context of subjects being persuaded. Between this group and Sam Harris's work (here and here), UCLA is giving UCSD a run for their neuroscience money. (But I think we all know UCSD is the real neuroscience institution.)
Keep in mind the distinction between persuasion, and evaluation of truth. As we blog-writing and -reading rationalists should know by now, logos isn't the whole game.
Keep in mind the distinction between persuasion, and evaluation of truth. As we blog-writing and -reading rationalists should know by now, logos isn't the whole game.
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Fred Phelps and Westboro Church Coming to San Diego
I don't think I have to explain on an atheist blog who Fred Phelps is. Want to counter protest? One coordination site is here. Leave a comment if you're going; I'll probably be at one of the later ones.
The Excuse Olympics
Religious people sometimes call atheists mean for actively undermining passionately-held but silly beliefs. That's not mean; it's honest, even concerned. If your neighbor told you there was a real live leprechaun in her backyard, would you say "that's nice" for fear of hurting her feelings, or would you engage her seriously, for fear of how her leprechaun complex might affect how she raises her two children? This assumes of course that you don't believe in leprechauns; and if you think whether a few hundred million other people believe in leprechauns should make a difference to your own willingness to believe in them, then I might be having the same kind of conversation with you.
So if your neighbor says, "Oh, you're mean for trying to take away my belief in leprechauns!" you say, "No, I'm not mean. If you want mean, go to Mike's blog. Mike is mean."
I am. I really do enjoy watching people squirm to come up with excuses when confronted with good evidence against their beliefs. I'm not alone in this; many of us do. Does this help the reputation of atheists? Or does it convince anybody? No, of course not. That's why I don't give into this tendency with on-the-fence people that I stand a chance of influencing. But some people, you're not going to convince no matter what you do. Ken Ham and Jenny McCarthy just have have too much invested and their fans and family members would be angry with them if they changed their mind. So even if they know right now the game is up, they'd keep parroting the same nonsense. It's cases like that where I give myself permission to be mean.
One neat way to be mean is to treat these kinds of people as study subjects. Steven Novella is my idol because on the occasions he is faced with the unhygienic task of dealing directly with (vaccine denialists, IDiots, etc.) he does exactly this. It's a great way to be effective and control one's own blood pressure while predicting the other guy/gal's moves and progressively pissing them off until they can't see straight (if you're the only one laughing, you're winning). I don't know if Novella does this deliberately or not - he's a neurologist, so it would probably be easier for him then the rest of us - but in any event he's still far more gentlemanly than I am about it, so I can't blame him for my mean streak. (Maybe Madamoiselle ERV? Who knows.)
A fun game to play is to anticipate and document (on their forums) the excuses and goal-post-moving that go on every time new data becomes available that undermines one of these beloved positions. How can intelligent design be further undermined, you ask? I know; I'm imagining one of those precipices that somehow keep supporting Wile E. Coyote for a few seconds even though it's floating in mid-air and no longer connected to the rest of the mesa. Ask yourself what you would say if you were desperately wedded to a position and had to twist the world in such a way that every new fact further supported it (or at least was deemed irrelevant). The reason the game is fun is that you can go to creationism websites or anti-vaccine discussion groups or wherever, and post these excuses in advance of such findings becoming available!
The real touchdown comes when the next such factual crisis arises, and the nutcases in question can't make any new excuse that hasn't already (mockingly) been documented on their very forum by a skeptic, under the guise of "if I was a charlatan or desperate, here is the B.S. I would say the next time X happens". This takes the wind out of their sails, to put it mildly. The more specific you can be, the better! When you think about it, you'll find that you can come very close to the verbatim excuses these folks will make. They're surprisingly predictable. Join in the fun! Possible match-ups:
When nothing happens in 2012 - I posted about this before. I'm really mean to New Agey types.
Next transition fossil find - Just in the last decade we've had Ardi, land-mammal to whale transitions, fish-to-amphibians, and even the final step in prebiotic RNA synthesis. What creative squirming will they do next time?
Next study showing no link between vaccines and autism
Next big earthquake in San Francisco - inspired by a line that Hitchens put in God is Not Great
Next event in Biblical/Quranic scholarship - a few years ago the gospel of Judas was discovered. There was some hemming and hawwing to explain why it was okay that the New Testament just plum forgot this.
HIV denialists - Specifically, what they'll say if the vaccine currently in development works?
Can you think of more? Add to the fun!
You can also try betting people, but when money is involved, suddenly people become circumspect about their beliefs (or very morally concerned about gambling). If you can get them to put money in escrow (because they're scoundrels), by all means do that. But if they back out (as people without the courage of their convictions usually do), you can join the Excuse Olympics.
The important thing is not to wait for the event! Go out today and start picking on your favorite conspiracy theory or denialist, and then follow-up when the event in question occurs. "Hey, everyone, look at this post I made six months ago." If people tell you you're mean, blame me. It's all my fault. I did it.
Some will probably accuse me of being a troll, like when I used to go to Christian creationist sites and leave a post saying that as a Muslim creationist, I think they're all stupid, and then do the predictable parallel thing over at a Muslim creationism discussion (come on, admit that it's funny). But Jack Chick seems to be doing that sort of thing for us, so no big loss there.
So if your neighbor says, "Oh, you're mean for trying to take away my belief in leprechauns!" you say, "No, I'm not mean. If you want mean, go to Mike's blog. Mike is mean."
I am. I really do enjoy watching people squirm to come up with excuses when confronted with good evidence against their beliefs. I'm not alone in this; many of us do. Does this help the reputation of atheists? Or does it convince anybody? No, of course not. That's why I don't give into this tendency with on-the-fence people that I stand a chance of influencing. But some people, you're not going to convince no matter what you do. Ken Ham and Jenny McCarthy just have have too much invested and their fans and family members would be angry with them if they changed their mind. So even if they know right now the game is up, they'd keep parroting the same nonsense. It's cases like that where I give myself permission to be mean.
One neat way to be mean is to treat these kinds of people as study subjects. Steven Novella is my idol because on the occasions he is faced with the unhygienic task of dealing directly with (vaccine denialists, IDiots, etc.) he does exactly this. It's a great way to be effective and control one's own blood pressure while predicting the other guy/gal's moves and progressively pissing them off until they can't see straight (if you're the only one laughing, you're winning). I don't know if Novella does this deliberately or not - he's a neurologist, so it would probably be easier for him then the rest of us - but in any event he's still far more gentlemanly than I am about it, so I can't blame him for my mean streak. (Maybe Madamoiselle ERV? Who knows.)
A fun game to play is to anticipate and document (on their forums) the excuses and goal-post-moving that go on every time new data becomes available that undermines one of these beloved positions. How can intelligent design be further undermined, you ask? I know; I'm imagining one of those precipices that somehow keep supporting Wile E. Coyote for a few seconds even though it's floating in mid-air and no longer connected to the rest of the mesa. Ask yourself what you would say if you were desperately wedded to a position and had to twist the world in such a way that every new fact further supported it (or at least was deemed irrelevant). The reason the game is fun is that you can go to creationism websites or anti-vaccine discussion groups or wherever, and post these excuses in advance of such findings becoming available!
The real touchdown comes when the next such factual crisis arises, and the nutcases in question can't make any new excuse that hasn't already (mockingly) been documented on their very forum by a skeptic, under the guise of "if I was a charlatan or desperate, here is the B.S. I would say the next time X happens". This takes the wind out of their sails, to put it mildly. The more specific you can be, the better! When you think about it, you'll find that you can come very close to the verbatim excuses these folks will make. They're surprisingly predictable. Join in the fun! Possible match-ups:
When nothing happens in 2012 - I posted about this before. I'm really mean to New Agey types.
Next transition fossil find - Just in the last decade we've had Ardi, land-mammal to whale transitions, fish-to-amphibians, and even the final step in prebiotic RNA synthesis. What creative squirming will they do next time?
Next study showing no link between vaccines and autism
Next big earthquake in San Francisco - inspired by a line that Hitchens put in God is Not Great
Next event in Biblical/Quranic scholarship - a few years ago the gospel of Judas was discovered. There was some hemming and hawwing to explain why it was okay that the New Testament just plum forgot this.
HIV denialists - Specifically, what they'll say if the vaccine currently in development works?
Can you think of more? Add to the fun!
You can also try betting people, but when money is involved, suddenly people become circumspect about their beliefs (or very morally concerned about gambling). If you can get them to put money in escrow (because they're scoundrels), by all means do that. But if they back out (as people without the courage of their convictions usually do), you can join the Excuse Olympics.
The important thing is not to wait for the event! Go out today and start picking on your favorite conspiracy theory or denialist, and then follow-up when the event in question occurs. "Hey, everyone, look at this post I made six months ago." If people tell you you're mean, blame me. It's all my fault. I did it.
Some will probably accuse me of being a troll, like when I used to go to Christian creationist sites and leave a post saying that as a Muslim creationist, I think they're all stupid, and then do the predictable parallel thing over at a Muslim creationism discussion (come on, admit that it's funny). But Jack Chick seems to be doing that sort of thing for us, so no big loss there.
Saturday, October 10, 2009
Vaccine Denialists Are Hilarious
In the Onion they're funny, but not so much if you're one of their kids. Or neighbors. Second Onion vaccine article this year.
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
More Insults Please
Remember that Mohammed cartoon? Cover your eyes if you don't want to be party to insulting a major religion - I'm doing my public service by posting it again:
An editorial in the Wall Street Journal wants to be quite clear: this is definitely an insult, and there should be more such insults. Having said that, I'm curious: how did Blasphemy Day go over in Ireland?
An editorial in the Wall Street Journal wants to be quite clear: this is definitely an insult, and there should be more such insults. Having said that, I'm curious: how did Blasphemy Day go over in Ireland?
The Greatest Brain Study Ever
Read it. You'll see. I think this result supports my contention that religious terms are really contentless social signaling noises.
Monday, October 5, 2009
Starting a Campus Rationalist Political Group
I went to the San Diego Atheist Coalition meeting last week, and this week I'm going to try the local San Diego Humanist group. It's good to network; I've been talking to people about what to do at UCSD, since what appears to have been the only atheist group is now defunct.
I met up with someone on campus today (hi William) and rather than just resurrect the previous group, I think I'm going to do an experiment and organize something around issues where we can make a difference, rather than "atheism", whatever that can mean. It's a frequent catch-22 for us that it seems strange to organize a group around the absence of something. It is - but of course, that's not really what we're doing. We're organized positively around the presence of reason, transparency and accountability.
Look: I might find it odd that my neighbor believes in a telepathic ghost who lives in the sky. And as one person to another, I will be glad to engage her and ask her why she believes that and maybe if she wouldn't be able to live a better life without that belief. What I do care about is whether she expects my kids to be taught about her sky ghost, or she votes based on what the sky ghost tells her to do. But like many (if not most) sky-ghost believers, this neighbor will probably go through all kinds of contortions to interpret the sky ghost's book in such a way as to arrive at the same morality and make the same decisions as a rational citizen of twenty-first century. Because this particular madness affects crowds, it bears close scrutiny. But if she is just as willing to fight for separation of church and state in the form of keeping creationism out of schools, encouraging medical research, and protecting women's choice, I'm happy to get on board with her. What matters is not the rhetorical process but the result.
That's why I'm going to do an experiment. Instead of starting up another campus atheist group, I'm going to start something like "Rationalist Political Issues", except hopefully more inspiring. A few months back I posted about political issues that atheists care most about. Not only does an action-oriented group not suffer from the lack of focus that can creep into atheist meetings, we can coordinate with pre-existing single-issue groups - and, a rationalist action (as opposed to atheist) group is also more inclusive. Rational theists welcome!
The first step is to come up with a name, and as you can see by my unmemorable title above, I got nothing. Happy to take suggestions.
I met up with someone on campus today (hi William) and rather than just resurrect the previous group, I think I'm going to do an experiment and organize something around issues where we can make a difference, rather than "atheism", whatever that can mean. It's a frequent catch-22 for us that it seems strange to organize a group around the absence of something. It is - but of course, that's not really what we're doing. We're organized positively around the presence of reason, transparency and accountability.
Look: I might find it odd that my neighbor believes in a telepathic ghost who lives in the sky. And as one person to another, I will be glad to engage her and ask her why she believes that and maybe if she wouldn't be able to live a better life without that belief. What I do care about is whether she expects my kids to be taught about her sky ghost, or she votes based on what the sky ghost tells her to do. But like many (if not most) sky-ghost believers, this neighbor will probably go through all kinds of contortions to interpret the sky ghost's book in such a way as to arrive at the same morality and make the same decisions as a rational citizen of twenty-first century. Because this particular madness affects crowds, it bears close scrutiny. But if she is just as willing to fight for separation of church and state in the form of keeping creationism out of schools, encouraging medical research, and protecting women's choice, I'm happy to get on board with her. What matters is not the rhetorical process but the result.
That's why I'm going to do an experiment. Instead of starting up another campus atheist group, I'm going to start something like "Rationalist Political Issues", except hopefully more inspiring. A few months back I posted about political issues that atheists care most about. Not only does an action-oriented group not suffer from the lack of focus that can creep into atheist meetings, we can coordinate with pre-existing single-issue groups - and, a rationalist action (as opposed to atheist) group is also more inclusive. Rational theists welcome!
The first step is to come up with a name, and as you can see by my unmemorable title above, I got nothing. Happy to take suggestions.
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Theodicy and Team Loyalty
What a bad atheist I am. Blasphemy day comes and goes, and here I am not doing anything blasphemous! Well, the night before I went to the San Diego Atheist Coaltion meeting; is there a blasphemy carry-forward accounting principle? Wait - today I drew blood (my own) to look at hemoglobin variants that have evolved in response to millions of years of exposure to malaria parasites. Surely such application of reason and rejection of arguments from authority to improve human happiness and productivity must be threatening some religion somewhere (that's produced nothing but hot air). Perhaps most importantly, I always listen to Black Sabbath every first of October. (Cue War Pigs.) That has to count for something.
I think the recent open-air debates on the problem of theodicy (how can a good all-powerful God exist if suffering also does) between Andrew Sullivan, Jerry Coyne, and a truckload of their readers are probably more corrosive to religion's unquestionability than any shocking T-shirt we could have worn yesterday.
I like Andrew Sullivan a lot so my words are probably a lot less pointed than they might otherwise be. But what a lot of Sullivan's reasons for not losing religion come down to - and what a lot of otherwise reasonable religious people's reasons come down to - is that this is what they were raised to believe, therefore, it feels right and has meaning to them. All of which I have no reason to doubt; none of which has anything to do with whether it's true. This "position", in Sullivan's case, is especially apparent in his must-read exchange with Sam Harris. And it's especially illustrative that a complex, reflective, bright person like Sullivan issues this line of baloney. That is, if Sullivan is capable of this doublethink, so is anybody.
Do atheists have any doublethoughts like this? Sure - if you're a sports fan. You're probably emotionally connected to one team, likely since childhood. In my case it's Penn State football, and to be honest I don't even care about college football anymore - but the programming goes back to age 2, and despite my athletic apathy it's still damn hard for me to see Penn State lose a game. Or for that matter, to fairly judge whether a penalty was deserved (my most popular method: if it was the other team, it's deserved, and vice versa). Like me, you may even notice this incongruence in yourself but allow yourself the luxury of this non-objectivity as an amusement - but the fact is, the emotional programming is not under our conscious control. Hence Sullivan's digging in his heels and saying he just knows it's true, and that's that.
This is valuable, because it can provide a window for life-long atheists into what religious belief is like - at least the social aspect of it (not to mention an additional rhetorical vehicle for on the fence theists). If someone approached me and said "you have one month to erase your emotional attachment to Penn State football, and if you succeed, I'll give you a million dollars" - even if I could bring myself to say "the money is more important than this core part of my identity that my deceased father would have been ashamed of me for abandoning" - I would have no idea how to go about it. Perhaps some kind of Skinnerian conditioning with electric shocks; certainly no one could "argue" me out of my programming, because it's not a propositional mode of behavior in the first place. I submit that the experience of emotional commitment to a sports team is exactly the same as the experience of counting oneself part of a religion (a Giants game - the Hajj - spot the difference!); and I further think that eventually, we'll be able to directly point out the origin of this behavior in the brain.
I think the recent open-air debates on the problem of theodicy (how can a good all-powerful God exist if suffering also does) between Andrew Sullivan, Jerry Coyne, and a truckload of their readers are probably more corrosive to religion's unquestionability than any shocking T-shirt we could have worn yesterday.
I like Andrew Sullivan a lot so my words are probably a lot less pointed than they might otherwise be. But what a lot of Sullivan's reasons for not losing religion come down to - and what a lot of otherwise reasonable religious people's reasons come down to - is that this is what they were raised to believe, therefore, it feels right and has meaning to them. All of which I have no reason to doubt; none of which has anything to do with whether it's true. This "position", in Sullivan's case, is especially apparent in his must-read exchange with Sam Harris. And it's especially illustrative that a complex, reflective, bright person like Sullivan issues this line of baloney. That is, if Sullivan is capable of this doublethink, so is anybody.
Do atheists have any doublethoughts like this? Sure - if you're a sports fan. You're probably emotionally connected to one team, likely since childhood. In my case it's Penn State football, and to be honest I don't even care about college football anymore - but the programming goes back to age 2, and despite my athletic apathy it's still damn hard for me to see Penn State lose a game. Or for that matter, to fairly judge whether a penalty was deserved (my most popular method: if it was the other team, it's deserved, and vice versa). Like me, you may even notice this incongruence in yourself but allow yourself the luxury of this non-objectivity as an amusement - but the fact is, the emotional programming is not under our conscious control. Hence Sullivan's digging in his heels and saying he just knows it's true, and that's that.
This is valuable, because it can provide a window for life-long atheists into what religious belief is like - at least the social aspect of it (not to mention an additional rhetorical vehicle for on the fence theists). If someone approached me and said "you have one month to erase your emotional attachment to Penn State football, and if you succeed, I'll give you a million dollars" - even if I could bring myself to say "the money is more important than this core part of my identity that my deceased father would have been ashamed of me for abandoning" - I would have no idea how to go about it. Perhaps some kind of Skinnerian conditioning with electric shocks; certainly no one could "argue" me out of my programming, because it's not a propositional mode of behavior in the first place. I submit that the experience of emotional commitment to a sports team is exactly the same as the experience of counting oneself part of a religion (a Giants game - the Hajj - spot the difference!); and I further think that eventually, we'll be able to directly point out the origin of this behavior in the brain.
Sunday, September 27, 2009
The Nones
"Nones" a) are yet another charming word for non-religious people and b) are growing.
This is good. While I admit I get frustrated when someone who is clearly an atheist is uncomfortable applying the word to her or himself, the growth of the non-religious is good news no matter how you slice it.
So how do we benefit from this? How do we keep naivete and/or complacency from leading us back to where we were in national politics in (say) 2003? It has something to do with teaching positive values in families and schools - human moral values based on reason, skepticism, openness and individual accountability.
This is good. While I admit I get frustrated when someone who is clearly an atheist is uncomfortable applying the word to her or himself, the growth of the non-religious is good news no matter how you slice it.
So how do we benefit from this? How do we keep naivete and/or complacency from leading us back to where we were in national politics in (say) 2003? It has something to do with teaching positive values in families and schools - human moral values based on reason, skepticism, openness and individual accountability.
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
Look What Happens When You DO Try to Teach Religion in Schools
Whiners! Via Hemant at Friendlyatheist, we see the story of mainstream religion showing its true colors when a Canadian public school tried to teach religion - the facts about religion, all religions: the Christians sue.
They lost, fortunately. But isn't this interesting - because isn't this exactly what you would expect if what these Christians were up to was not protecting religious expression in general (as they often claim), but rather forcing their own brand of religion on public schoolchildren?
Dan Dennett and others have proposed teaching about religion (all religions) in public schools; amazingly, the American religious right has never taken him up on it. Why? Could it be, possibly, because exposure to multiple religions allows kids to start seeing the common motifs and develop a healthy skepticism?
They lost, fortunately. But isn't this interesting - because isn't this exactly what you would expect if what these Christians were up to was not protecting religious expression in general (as they often claim), but rather forcing their own brand of religion on public schoolchildren?
Dan Dennett and others have proposed teaching about religion (all religions) in public schools; amazingly, the American religious right has never taken him up on it. Why? Could it be, possibly, because exposure to multiple religions allows kids to start seeing the common motifs and develop a healthy skepticism?
Monday, September 7, 2009
Experiment: What Happens When You Advertise Your Atheism
So I just moved from san Francisco to San Diego. Everyone up in the Bay warned me: "San Diego is so conservative!" While I've learned to take it with a grain of salt any time my fellow Bay Areans tell me a place is conservative (compared to SF, where isn't?) I think it's probably true that San Diego is somewhat more conservative than SF.
So, when I ordered the following T-shirt from Cafe Press ("Proud to Be An American, Proud to Be An Atheist"), I wondered whether I would get negative reactions from anyone I ran into during the course of the Labor Day weekend. Since I bought this particular shirt because I thought it would be more likely to get positive consideration from people who would otherwise not give the time of day to an atheist, I hoped not. But: only one way to find out.
So, walking around at the beach or at grocery stores, I noticed a few glances my way, but no one said anything. Except for one person: a (strikingly attractive!) young woman working at the checkout counter at Mitsuwa Markets, who gave me a very nice smile and said "I dig your shirt." So much for all the warnings about conservative San Diego!
Let's review:
Negative consequences of wearing atheist shirt: none
Positive consequences of wearing atheist shirt: compliment from attractive female
If you're not out of the closet, or you hold back in advertising your atheism, I can only hope this serves as encouragement.
So, when I ordered the following T-shirt from Cafe Press ("Proud to Be An American, Proud to Be An Atheist"), I wondered whether I would get negative reactions from anyone I ran into during the course of the Labor Day weekend. Since I bought this particular shirt because I thought it would be more likely to get positive consideration from people who would otherwise not give the time of day to an atheist, I hoped not. But: only one way to find out.
So, walking around at the beach or at grocery stores, I noticed a few glances my way, but no one said anything. Except for one person: a (strikingly attractive!) young woman working at the checkout counter at Mitsuwa Markets, who gave me a very nice smile and said "I dig your shirt." So much for all the warnings about conservative San Diego!
Let's review:
Negative consequences of wearing atheist shirt: none
Positive consequences of wearing atheist shirt: compliment from attractive female
If you're not out of the closet, or you hold back in advertising your atheism, I can only hope this serves as encouragement.
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
Orientation Week at Med School
So I'm on Day 3 of my orientation at UCSD School of Medicine (hence the silence); here are a few interesting observations.
- Repeating an observation I've made before: nowhere in the curriculum that I have seen outlined is there anything about prayer. I would expect this to be the case at most other med schools in the U.S. Why would this be? Either a) medical educators are evil and are intentionally neglecting a valuable treatment modality, or b) medical education in the U.S. is just bad, or c) prayer is useless, and we're focusing on actually treating people.
- Very little mention of religion so far, although this morning we had food provided by the Christian Medical Fellowship. No coffee though! It's crossed my mind to establish a competing organization, but one thing at a time.
- Doing a little demographic exercise, we were asked to stand up if we were (younger than 25, older than 25, married, born outside the U.S., etc.) The speaker asked those who regularly attend weekly religious services to stand. I would estimate less than a fourth. Regular churchgoers: are you comfortable going to doctors like these?
- Repeating an observation I've made before: nowhere in the curriculum that I have seen outlined is there anything about prayer. I would expect this to be the case at most other med schools in the U.S. Why would this be? Either a) medical educators are evil and are intentionally neglecting a valuable treatment modality, or b) medical education in the U.S. is just bad, or c) prayer is useless, and we're focusing on actually treating people.
- Very little mention of religion so far, although this morning we had food provided by the Christian Medical Fellowship. No coffee though! It's crossed my mind to establish a competing organization, but one thing at a time.
- Doing a little demographic exercise, we were asked to stand up if we were (younger than 25, older than 25, married, born outside the U.S., etc.) The speaker asked those who regularly attend weekly religious services to stand. I would estimate less than a fourth. Regular churchgoers: are you comfortable going to doctors like these?
Sunday, August 16, 2009
When Was the Last Time Your Worldview Cured a Disease?
Atheists get tied up in the creation/evolution debate, and for the wrong reasons. While it might be cool, the average man or woman in the street isn't directly affected by finding a new transitional ancestor for a while. Religious shills attack evolution, not because they're so concerned specifically about evolution, but because it's an aspect of science that at once severely erodes faith but is just odd enough to the unfamiliar that it can be used as a wedge to draw people away from critical thinking and Enlightenment values in general.
In my view, reason and science are important activities of one specific animal that serve as an extension of life's ability to recognize patterns and act on them consistently in ways to increase the likelihood not only of survival but of happiness. Looked at this way, it's science's ability to predict, and change the world, that is important.
So, in terms of public relations - i.e., in terms of selling what science offers to an often ambivalent or outright hostile American public, forget retrodiction of specific evolutionary innovations, cool as they might bexxx. In the creation-evolution debate, pull back the camera a little bit and ask creationists: so what are your predictions of discoveries in the next five to ten years? Not just fossils, but medical advances. How, exactly, will these medical advances result from a creationist or Christ-centered approach to biology? You'll find that there will be one of three reactions:
1) Most likely: obfuscation. The subject will be heard to utter such statements as: "Well, I really can't say." "It's whatever God chooses to allow us to learn." They might come out with something about faith healing (remind them that every single day at the hospital down the street, there's observable healing going on that no one disputes.) Be ready with solid predictions of your own, as well as how they came out of "secular" science.
2) They'll take the bait and make predictions. This can go two ways:
a) the subject can make concrete and reasonable predictions that are in no way based on creationism. Be ready to call bullshit and/or ask them why a secular villain like yourself is making exactly the same predictions.
OR
b) the subject will make concrete bullshit predictions (exorcism being added to medical school curriculum; prayer being added to actuarial tables); be ready to make a bet with them and make some money.
3) They'll admit that healing people doesn't matter to them. Although this is the worst outcome for the world in general (i.e. that there are such people in it) it's the best for you, because you've now gotten them to admit that their worldview is sterile and incoherent but it's still more important to espouse it than to cure the sick. Make sure you're very clear with them and any listeners on this point. There are many religious people who will be just as disgusted with this attitude as you are.
The greatest flowering of freedom and productivity in human history so far is a result of the application of reason to escape religion; the worst period of European history (the Dark Ages) resulted from the dominance of religion. Modern science is just one more example of this. Miss no opportunity to make religious shills pick a side. They're either on yours, or they reveal their true and distasteful aims.
In my view, reason and science are important activities of one specific animal that serve as an extension of life's ability to recognize patterns and act on them consistently in ways to increase the likelihood not only of survival but of happiness. Looked at this way, it's science's ability to predict, and change the world, that is important.
So, in terms of public relations - i.e., in terms of selling what science offers to an often ambivalent or outright hostile American public, forget retrodiction of specific evolutionary innovations, cool as they might bexxx. In the creation-evolution debate, pull back the camera a little bit and ask creationists: so what are your predictions of discoveries in the next five to ten years? Not just fossils, but medical advances. How, exactly, will these medical advances result from a creationist or Christ-centered approach to biology? You'll find that there will be one of three reactions:
1) Most likely: obfuscation. The subject will be heard to utter such statements as: "Well, I really can't say." "It's whatever God chooses to allow us to learn." They might come out with something about faith healing (remind them that every single day at the hospital down the street, there's observable healing going on that no one disputes.) Be ready with solid predictions of your own, as well as how they came out of "secular" science.
2) They'll take the bait and make predictions. This can go two ways:
a) the subject can make concrete and reasonable predictions that are in no way based on creationism. Be ready to call bullshit and/or ask them why a secular villain like yourself is making exactly the same predictions.
OR
b) the subject will make concrete bullshit predictions (exorcism being added to medical school curriculum; prayer being added to actuarial tables); be ready to make a bet with them and make some money.
3) They'll admit that healing people doesn't matter to them. Although this is the worst outcome for the world in general (i.e. that there are such people in it) it's the best for you, because you've now gotten them to admit that their worldview is sterile and incoherent but it's still more important to espouse it than to cure the sick. Make sure you're very clear with them and any listeners on this point. There are many religious people who will be just as disgusted with this attitude as you are.
The greatest flowering of freedom and productivity in human history so far is a result of the application of reason to escape religion; the worst period of European history (the Dark Ages) resulted from the dominance of religion. Modern science is just one more example of this. Miss no opportunity to make religious shills pick a side. They're either on yours, or they reveal their true and distasteful aims.
Here's What's in Store For Us, Atheists
As with all other topics, Rowan Atkinson puts his imprint on the process of damnation. There's even an illustration of the problem with Pascal's Wager if you pay attention:
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
More Atheism by Oprah
This is great! A family woman using the word "atheism" in a positive sense, in reference to herself, on a major press outlet. Fantastic! And not even the first time.
Thursday, August 6, 2009
American Psychological Association Repudiates "Cures" For Gayness
In a 125-4 vote. Of course, the press has to interview the evangelicals with the opposing viewpoint, and they do. Exodus programs are the "treatment" that these unfortunate evangelical psychologists carry out. Two of the evangelicals even describe their own study thusly: "...on average the attempt to change will not be harmful." A ringing endorsement if ever there was one! Hey honey, we have a treatment for your arthritis. Well actually, it's only ineffective but harmless. On average."
I wonder if one of the psychologists was James Dobson (yes, that's what his degree is in). I also wonder what they would think about treatments to cure evangelicals?
I wonder if one of the psychologists was James Dobson (yes, that's what his degree is in). I also wonder what they would think about treatments to cure evangelicals?
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
Challenge Their Picture of Atheists
Hemant already posted a piece on The Friendly Atheist about Eoban Taylor's appearance on FOX about the Bloomington, Indiana bus ads. (By the way, good showing for Eoban, especially on FOX).
There's one particular utterance by the pastor they put on opposite Eoban that bears emphasis: "I feel it's an outright attack on Christianity. I feel like the language of it is inflammatory. I think that this is just an agenda trying to be passed by the Left."
Eoban had another strategy and he stuck to it; were I in his position, I don't know if I would've been able to keep myself from saying, "By the Left? Pastor, I'll bet good money that I'm the only real conservative in this room!"
I often mention my political leanings, not to convert other atheists, but to point out that it's a big tent we're in. In this case, the more salient point is that it's often more effective to erode the audience's conception of what atheists look like. In the same way that Democrats were able to destroy the Religious Right's monopoly on claims to patriotism over the past several years, we should continue to dismantle these stereotypes and political/demographic associations that often go unchallenged. Religion is a social mode of thinking that only gets jammed into pseudo-intellectual rhetoric when attacked by the likes of us; statements of religious belief propagate through family and community circles and are mostly devoid of content, apart from signalling fidelity to group norms. That's why, from James Dobson's standpoint, the worst thing you can do is be the guy or gal next door.
There's one particular utterance by the pastor they put on opposite Eoban that bears emphasis: "I feel it's an outright attack on Christianity. I feel like the language of it is inflammatory. I think that this is just an agenda trying to be passed by the Left."
Eoban had another strategy and he stuck to it; were I in his position, I don't know if I would've been able to keep myself from saying, "By the Left? Pastor, I'll bet good money that I'm the only real conservative in this room!"
I often mention my political leanings, not to convert other atheists, but to point out that it's a big tent we're in. In this case, the more salient point is that it's often more effective to erode the audience's conception of what atheists look like. In the same way that Democrats were able to destroy the Religious Right's monopoly on claims to patriotism over the past several years, we should continue to dismantle these stereotypes and political/demographic associations that often go unchallenged. Religion is a social mode of thinking that only gets jammed into pseudo-intellectual rhetoric when attacked by the likes of us; statements of religious belief propagate through family and community circles and are mostly devoid of content, apart from signalling fidelity to group norms. That's why, from James Dobson's standpoint, the worst thing you can do is be the guy or gal next door.
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
If John Travolta Leaves Scientology - Let's Support Him
When Ted Haggard had his fall from grace, the temptation in the atheist blogosphere to be snarky was too strong for many. Can you imagine what a powerful statement it would have been for Haggard to stand up and say, "I'm sorry for what I did before. I was leading people into a life of lies. I'm a proud gay man and I have a better life now that I can be honest." Less than likely, but I still think it's important to know that when people leave their old community, there's a new one there to support them.
There have been rumors today (quickly squashed by usual PR machinery) that the death of John Travolta's son has led him to question his involvement in the Church of Scientology. If so - welcome, John. We were sorry to hear about your son, but you're among real friends now.
There have been rumors today (quickly squashed by usual PR machinery) that the death of John Travolta's son has led him to question his involvement in the Church of Scientology. If so - welcome, John. We were sorry to hear about your son, but you're among real friends now.
Hey PZ, the Social Sciences Make More De-verts!
Turns out that I wasn't high when I started noticing that there aren't many theist linguists and anthropologists. These are the sciences that most turn the tools of the Enlightenment on the self, leaving nowhere for nonsense to run.
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Patricia Churchland's Presentation to the Bush Bioethics Panel
Starts at 51:20 here. Good discussion about the history of (one corner of) the religious resistance to medical advances.
Friday, July 24, 2009
At the Heart of Atheism's Concerns
In the past week at Andrew Sullivan's general culture and politics blog at the Atlantic, two guest posters have had an ongoing series of posts about atheism. The first is the always interesting and sometimes correct Robert Wright, who I've written about previously; and the other is one of the regular back-ups on the site, Patrick Appel.
It's not the first time that the Catholic (but strongly pro-separation) Sullivan or his blog have covered atheism: Sullivan's online debate with Sam Harris is not to be missed. Appel posts part of a reaction from a blogger at the Economist (this positive exposure in mainstream publications' blogs is great!); the Economist blogger didn't like the old New-Atheists-are-fundamentalists bromide, which was of course aired in the discussion. But the point that comes through in a theist's response is one that I think we can get on board with:
"At the heart of atheism’s concerns is that irrational thinking creates problems in the world."
Bingo! I'll give credit to an "outsider" for cutting through trees to see the forest. That said, I would argue that religion is a special case of irrationality, in fact one of the worst cases, because it's a cognitive bias with self-perpetuating social cohesion that often results in suffering and violence. I would even say one difference between people who self-identify with the label of skeptic vs. atheist is the degree to which they consider religion a horrendous special case of irrationality worth spending the most time on debunking.
I homed in on this discussion because one challenge that many atheists struggle with, early in their atheism, is finding explicit positive values in atheism, rather than just defining themselves by rejection of others' values. By recognizing this need and building the community we can make the transition easier for newly-minted atheists, and we can probably also avoid the stumbling, where we either ignore the benefits of community because we associate it too much with religion, or we end up recapitulating religion to a silly degree; a great community-focused atheist blog is The Meming of Life. Recognizing irrationality as a core concern of atheism (rather than just "destroy religion) also provides a more constructive basis to sincere discussions with the religious; we all have irrational biases and we all can recognize them in others. Even if you have different definitions to start out, I think it's safe to say that most religious people would say they also want a more rational world.
It's not the first time that the Catholic (but strongly pro-separation) Sullivan or his blog have covered atheism: Sullivan's online debate with Sam Harris is not to be missed. Appel posts part of a reaction from a blogger at the Economist (this positive exposure in mainstream publications' blogs is great!); the Economist blogger didn't like the old New-Atheists-are-fundamentalists bromide, which was of course aired in the discussion. But the point that comes through in a theist's response is one that I think we can get on board with:
"At the heart of atheism’s concerns is that irrational thinking creates problems in the world."
Bingo! I'll give credit to an "outsider" for cutting through trees to see the forest. That said, I would argue that religion is a special case of irrationality, in fact one of the worst cases, because it's a cognitive bias with self-perpetuating social cohesion that often results in suffering and violence. I would even say one difference between people who self-identify with the label of skeptic vs. atheist is the degree to which they consider religion a horrendous special case of irrationality worth spending the most time on debunking.
I homed in on this discussion because one challenge that many atheists struggle with, early in their atheism, is finding explicit positive values in atheism, rather than just defining themselves by rejection of others' values. By recognizing this need and building the community we can make the transition easier for newly-minted atheists, and we can probably also avoid the stumbling, where we either ignore the benefits of community because we associate it too much with religion, or we end up recapitulating religion to a silly degree; a great community-focused atheist blog is The Meming of Life. Recognizing irrationality as a core concern of atheism (rather than just "destroy religion) also provides a more constructive basis to sincere discussions with the religious; we all have irrational biases and we all can recognize them in others. Even if you have different definitions to start out, I think it's safe to say that most religious people would say they also want a more rational world.
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
De-Baptisms
This whole de-baptism thing seems to be gaining ground. Hey, if it's important to you, you're looking forward to it, that's fine. Have a good time with it.
But I would also exhort you as a newly-minted atheist to do the following, with our without the de-baptism:
Sign up for a marathon or hang-gliding.
Visit that city or national park you've somehow always read about, but never been to.
Go out for a drink! Or four. Take friends. All of them. Make new ones.
Ask that hot guy/girl you've been hesitating to ask for a date (or, take your husband/wife out for the romantic date of their lives).
Write a book. Plan out your skydiving certification schedule. Send out a resume for that long-shot job you really want. Put it in the calendar. Do it.
And if somebody notices the change - "Say, you got out of the right side of the bed today" - tell them it's because you're an atheist - a skeptic - a rationalist - a free human being.
But I would also exhort you as a newly-minted atheist to do the following, with our without the de-baptism:
Sign up for a marathon or hang-gliding.
Visit that city or national park you've somehow always read about, but never been to.
Go out for a drink! Or four. Take friends. All of them. Make new ones.
Ask that hot guy/girl you've been hesitating to ask for a date (or, take your husband/wife out for the romantic date of their lives).
Write a book. Plan out your skydiving certification schedule. Send out a resume for that long-shot job you really want. Put it in the calendar. Do it.
And if somebody notices the change - "Say, you got out of the right side of the bed today" - tell them it's because you're an atheist - a skeptic - a rationalist - a free human being.
Monday, July 20, 2009
Don't Debate, Just Bet
A while ago I offered that strategy as a way to benefit from those annoying online debates where it's the same argument being made by people new to the debate over and over again. It's the same idea that prediction markets use. Why not benefit? Turns out political odds blogger Nate Silver is taking the same approach. I'm all for it. In experiments, subjects will say any crazy thing that pops into their heads until there's money involved - then the results become more meaningful.
Thursday, July 16, 2009
What Do You Think About Illegal Religious Activity?
At China Digital Times, there's an interesting article about political education in Western China. Someone visited a rural school and found a sign at the school that translated into the title of this blog post. The sign seems intended for the teachers as much as for the students.
Among the 23 behaviors:
Opening private schools to study religious texts
Conducting marriage ceremonies in traditional methods
Encouraging students to attend religious services
Going on non-government-sponsored pilgrimages
Building new religious places without authorization
Organizing or hosting religious activities without government credentials.
Printing and distributing religious propaganda
Receiving religious contributions from foreign countries.
Arbitrarily growing religious following
Infiltration by foreign religious elements
Disseminating speech inconsistent with the official version
Organizing demonstrations or protests
Which of these, if any, do you think a government has the right to enforce? Which, if any, would governments be overstepping their bounds by enforcing?
Among the 23 behaviors:
Opening private schools to study religious texts
Conducting marriage ceremonies in traditional methods
Encouraging students to attend religious services
Going on non-government-sponsored pilgrimages
Building new religious places without authorization
Organizing or hosting religious activities without government credentials.
Printing and distributing religious propaganda
Receiving religious contributions from foreign countries.
Arbitrarily growing religious following
Infiltration by foreign religious elements
Disseminating speech inconsistent with the official version
Organizing demonstrations or protests
Which of these, if any, do you think a government has the right to enforce? Which, if any, would governments be overstepping their bounds by enforcing?
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Are Atheists Really Right-Wingers?
I recently had some nice things to say in Robert Wright's defense, but not this time. He has a piece in the Huffington Post that seems to be pandering to left-leaning readers in a rather divisive way. That is, he makes the case that the new atheists are right-wing hawks, which can only drive a wedge between organized atheism and a constituency typically friendly to secular ideals. Full article here; here's the intro:
One of Wright's problems: if the label "new atheists" applies only to the four horsemen, then Wright is wrong in 2 of 4 cases. Dawkins is typically silent on political questions not having directly to do with atheism; I've never seen him advocate the simple-minded "there would be peace and no problems in the Middle East without religion". Meanwhile, Dennett has described himself as an ACLU liberal, who reacts with obvious distaste in one interview to Hitchens' assertion that the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division is the guardian of secular democracy. If the label "new atheists" applies to vocal, organized atheists in the past few years as a whole, then Wright is way off, given to political diversity of atheists.
Even granting for the sake of argument that Hitchens and Harris are representative, Wright makes no argument as to the connection between their atheism and their hawkish political views. Is it possible that we're seeing founder effect? That is, you pick 2 from any group of thirty million, and they're likely to over- or under-represent many traits. Hey, 2 of 4 new atheists are English-born, and there are far fewer Brits than Americans - so there is a link between being British and being atheist! 2 of 4 new atheists have some Jewish ancestors! Another link!
Wright is also disingenuous when he picks on the distinction in terror-terms between the poor-and-exploited practicing Abrahamic religions, and the poor-and-exploited who don't. I've often pointed out that American atheists are in a unique position in our country's political discourse, because we can say "theocracy, terrorism and female circumcision are bad" without any subtext of "and we should convert those damn fur'ners to Christianity." In this piece Wright plays on the American left's discomfort with speaking too negatively of Islam, because for 8 years we had to listen to a GOP administration speaking in a code of Christianity = good and Islam = evil (though sometimes they were more direct).
Wright also says, first quoting Sam Harris:
Yes, the world is full of non-cancerous smokers, and Muslims who aren't terrorists. But smokers are more likely to be non-smokers than lung cancer victims and Muslims are more likely than non-Muslims to be suicide bombers. How many data points do we need? Add to this the phenomenon of middle and upper class religious extremists, and you start to see more clearly where the problem is. I'm not sure what Wright's point is here, and I'm disappointed that someone who is typically an innovative thinker is attacking a straw man.
The broader view, and the subtext of the whole piece - unstated, which I find significant - is the old canard that the new atheists are intolerant. Of theocracy? You're damn right. And that's a criticism?
It must strike progressive atheists as a stroke of bad luck that Christopher Hitchens, leading atheist spokesperson, happens to have hawkish views on foreign policy. After all, with atheists an overwhelmingly left-wing group, what were the chances that the loudest infidel in the western world would happen to be on the right?
One of Wright's problems: if the label "new atheists" applies only to the four horsemen, then Wright is wrong in 2 of 4 cases. Dawkins is typically silent on political questions not having directly to do with atheism; I've never seen him advocate the simple-minded "there would be peace and no problems in the Middle East without religion". Meanwhile, Dennett has described himself as an ACLU liberal, who reacts with obvious distaste in one interview to Hitchens' assertion that the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division is the guardian of secular democracy. If the label "new atheists" applies to vocal, organized atheists in the past few years as a whole, then Wright is way off, given to political diversity of atheists.
Even granting for the sake of argument that Hitchens and Harris are representative, Wright makes no argument as to the connection between their atheism and their hawkish political views. Is it possible that we're seeing founder effect? That is, you pick 2 from any group of thirty million, and they're likely to over- or under-represent many traits. Hey, 2 of 4 new atheists are English-born, and there are far fewer Brits than Americans - so there is a link between being British and being atheist! 2 of 4 new atheists have some Jewish ancestors! Another link!
Wright is also disingenuous when he picks on the distinction in terror-terms between the poor-and-exploited practicing Abrahamic religions, and the poor-and-exploited who don't. I've often pointed out that American atheists are in a unique position in our country's political discourse, because we can say "theocracy, terrorism and female circumcision are bad" without any subtext of "and we should convert those damn fur'ners to Christianity." In this piece Wright plays on the American left's discomfort with speaking too negatively of Islam, because for 8 years we had to listen to a GOP administration speaking in a code of Christianity = good and Islam = evil (though sometimes they were more direct).
Wright also says, first quoting Sam Harris:
"We can ignore all of these things, or treat them only to place them safely on the shelf, because the world is filled with poor, uneducated, and exploited peoples who do not commit acts of terrorism."
Yes, and the world is full of people who smoke and never get lung cancer. So, by Harris's logic, there's no chance that smoking is a risk factor for lung cancer -- and we never should have investigated that possibility!
Yes, the world is full of non-cancerous smokers, and Muslims who aren't terrorists. But smokers are more likely to be non-smokers than lung cancer victims and Muslims are more likely than non-Muslims to be suicide bombers. How many data points do we need? Add to this the phenomenon of middle and upper class religious extremists, and you start to see more clearly where the problem is. I'm not sure what Wright's point is here, and I'm disappointed that someone who is typically an innovative thinker is attacking a straw man.
The broader view, and the subtext of the whole piece - unstated, which I find significant - is the old canard that the new atheists are intolerant. Of theocracy? You're damn right. And that's a criticism?
Friday, July 10, 2009
Morals and Markets
I really am not trying to convert all atheists to be libertarian atheists, I promise - but I would like to point you to a piece in the Wall Street Journal by economist Tyler Cowen that surfaces an assumption that many of us atheists either have, or just never questioned. He was writing about the Pope's recent encyclical about global capitalism, which I referred to in my previous post. The most interesting part comes toward the end:
This superficially tracks more general Christian arguments that Enlightenment morality would never have appeared were it not for Christianity, though it bears keeping in mind when formulating your objections that Cowen is an atheist. For my part, I guess I've always assumed no conflict between morals and markets; that modern capitalism, as a product of the Enlightenment, is also a product of reason just as modern morality is. I don't even claim that other ways of allocating and growing wealth are necessarily irrational or immoral, just that they're not as good at it.
But Cowen implies the concordance of markets and morals is a special case of the way markets have fluorished in the Christian West. Do you think this is true? Will India and China experience a change in individual morality as their economies grow, or do you think the current arrangement of markets and morality in the West a local optimum - or a coincidence?
Your thoughts?
A truly revolutionary document would have dealt with the rise of China and India. Though Western society has experienced a widespread secularization, our versions of capitalism and democracy are still based squarely on Christian ideas, and I believe this marriage of liberalism and Christianity has been for the better. China and India, despite each having some number of Christians, have no realistic prospects for a comparable ideological accommodation between morals and markets, and so we are entering uncharted waters.
This superficially tracks more general Christian arguments that Enlightenment morality would never have appeared were it not for Christianity, though it bears keeping in mind when formulating your objections that Cowen is an atheist. For my part, I guess I've always assumed no conflict between morals and markets; that modern capitalism, as a product of the Enlightenment, is also a product of reason just as modern morality is. I don't even claim that other ways of allocating and growing wealth are necessarily irrational or immoral, just that they're not as good at it.
But Cowen implies the concordance of markets and morals is a special case of the way markets have fluorished in the Christian West. Do you think this is true? Will India and China experience a change in individual morality as their economies grow, or do you think the current arrangement of markets and morality in the West a local optimum - or a coincidence?
Your thoughts?
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
"Pope Blasts Capitalism Ahead of G-8"
As an atheist libertarian, I couldn't resist repeating the title of this CNN article. Then again, I can't blame atheists in the U.S. for being a little more suspicious of Adam Smith than they might otherwise be, given the (increasingly superficial) lip service that the Religious Right pays to the free market. When it produces something they don't like (like rock music or stem cell research) they forget all about their supposed devotion to what is, after all, an Enlightenment way of thinking.
So here's a Smith quote worth remembering: he said of a friend's death, "Poor David Hume is dying very fast, but with great cheerfulness and good humour and with more real resignation to the necessary course of things, than any Whining Christian ever dyed with pretended resignation to the will of God."
So here's a Smith quote worth remembering: he said of a friend's death, "Poor David Hume is dying very fast, but with great cheerfulness and good humour and with more real resignation to the necessary course of things, than any Whining Christian ever dyed with pretended resignation to the will of God."
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
Scientology and Psychiatry
Scientology's obsession with psychiatry is well-known, as are Tom Cruise's occasional anti-psychiatrist harangues. Less famous is Roder and Kubillus's Scientology-published book Psychiatrists: the Men Behind Hitler. It's from Scientology that we get quotes like this:
"...psychiatric theories that man is a mere animal have been used to rationalize, for example, the wholesale slaughter of human beings in World Wars I and II".
Starting to sound familiar? Exactly the same argument is used against evolution by creationists, i.e. that acceptance of the theory somehow leads to moral degradation and ultimately to genocide. Scientologists: assuming you think that Xenu evolved, how is your argument different from, and better than, the creationists'? Details and examples please; "it just obviously is" won't fly. Creationists, same question to you, but reversed. Atheists: another fun question for you to ask either party.
In the interest of full disclosure - something you won't find from many Operating Thetans - I intend to become a psychiatrist. How are my actions different from someone who merely intends to suppress the truth? I'm not exactly suppressing it by putting links to it in my blog, am I? On the other hand, Scientology's obsession with psychiatry seems curiously well-arranged to keep its brainwashed practitioners away from therapies that might help them. It's a religious innovation on par with the exaggeration of in-group morality and Abrahamic exclusivity to have No Other Gods Before Me.
No doubt this article will be popping up in the Google News feeds of the hordes of web-scrubbers the C of S employs (hi guys! Prove your reputation by harrassing me!), so here's a challenge. If the following is really true:
"...while Scientology is more visible than ever, with churches dotting every continent on Earth and millions of parishioners around the world, one is hard pressed to find even a single psychiatrist with a shingle on his door."
- from an article titled "The End of the Fight"
...then it's time for me to make a little money, as I often suggest. If any of you really believe this, then let's make a bet. We'll set a definition of the the triumph of Scientology over psychiatry that we both agree on and put the money in escrow with a third party. What, none of you has the courage of your convictions? Come on, let's make this interesting!
"...psychiatric theories that man is a mere animal have been used to rationalize, for example, the wholesale slaughter of human beings in World Wars I and II".
Starting to sound familiar? Exactly the same argument is used against evolution by creationists, i.e. that acceptance of the theory somehow leads to moral degradation and ultimately to genocide. Scientologists: assuming you think that Xenu evolved, how is your argument different from, and better than, the creationists'? Details and examples please; "it just obviously is" won't fly. Creationists, same question to you, but reversed. Atheists: another fun question for you to ask either party.
In the interest of full disclosure - something you won't find from many Operating Thetans - I intend to become a psychiatrist. How are my actions different from someone who merely intends to suppress the truth? I'm not exactly suppressing it by putting links to it in my blog, am I? On the other hand, Scientology's obsession with psychiatry seems curiously well-arranged to keep its brainwashed practitioners away from therapies that might help them. It's a religious innovation on par with the exaggeration of in-group morality and Abrahamic exclusivity to have No Other Gods Before Me.
No doubt this article will be popping up in the Google News feeds of the hordes of web-scrubbers the C of S employs (hi guys! Prove your reputation by harrassing me!), so here's a challenge. If the following is really true:
"...while Scientology is more visible than ever, with churches dotting every continent on Earth and millions of parishioners around the world, one is hard pressed to find even a single psychiatrist with a shingle on his door."
- from an article titled "The End of the Fight"
...then it's time for me to make a little money, as I often suggest. If any of you really believe this, then let's make a bet. We'll set a definition of the the triumph of Scientology over psychiatry that we both agree on and put the money in escrow with a third party. What, none of you has the courage of your convictions? Come on, let's make this interesting!
Monday, July 6, 2009
The Least You Can Say Is That Robert Wright Is Interesting
Bob Wright is an interesting guy in that he's a) technically atheist but b) still sees some kind of plan and c) is able to write and talk about the questions engagingly. An example of how he does see a design of sorts (not one coming from a personal god) is Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny.
I tend to distrust anything that smacks of the teleological, even one originating in the mute cold laws of physics. After all, the history of modern knowledge has largely been one of decentralizing the role of human action and viewpoints in the events of the universe, which is not surprising since we now understand that we're adapted to this one tiny pocket of it.
While they dissolve into theobabble at one point, I found his description of his experiences at a silent retreat to be really compelling - to the point where I'm thinking about trying it!
I tend to distrust anything that smacks of the teleological, even one originating in the mute cold laws of physics. After all, the history of modern knowledge has largely been one of decentralizing the role of human action and viewpoints in the events of the universe, which is not surprising since we now understand that we're adapted to this one tiny pocket of it.
While they dissolve into theobabble at one point, I found his description of his experiences at a silent retreat to be really compelling - to the point where I'm thinking about trying it!
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
If You're On The Latest Oklahoma Proclamations, What Are You Complaining About?
If you read any political or atheist blogs, you've already seen the most recent nuttiness by Oklahoma politician Sally Kern blaming the recession on immoral behavior ("the gays", as Andrew Sullivan put it). If you're on her list, what are you complaining about? For crying out loud, I've been trying to get my name on some Oklahoma proclamations for months to no avail, and you guys pick one up for free! No fair!
Moral Question for the Anti-Embryonic Stem Cell Research Crowd
A question that it's worth putting to pro-lifers is this: if an abortion is really morally equivalent to killing a human being, do you believe that aborting women should be tried for murder? If not, why not? Of course, there are some pro-lifers who explicitly want this, but when pressed on this question, many anti-abortionists equivocate and say something to the effect that "it's between her and God". It's a curious disconnect that might almost make you think they really don't believe what they say they do - and, if you point it out, might make them think that too.
I thought about this today when I was picking somebody up at lunch, and as I got off the freeway and saw the research facility where the worked, I thought "there are doubtless embryonic stem cells being used in research at this moment in that building". And then I imagined a group of black-clad special forces from Operation Rescue scaling the walls under cover of darkness with night vision goggles, to liberate the stem cells about to be "executed". Great premise for an action movie, right? Wrong, because to most people - even, I bet, anti-stem-cell types, it's ridiculous. And there's another question: if you run across someone who's adamantly against the use of embryonic stem cells in research, ask them if it seems justified to them, and if not, why not? Would it not be morally equivalent to U.S. troops breaking someone out of a WWII concentration camp? In case there's a temptation for them to equivocate by saying "at least some good might come out of the research being done on the stem cells", there was medical research being done by Mengele et al at the camps too. Can that possibly make a difference in either case anyway?
Stem cell blogs here and here.
I thought about this today when I was picking somebody up at lunch, and as I got off the freeway and saw the research facility where the worked, I thought "there are doubtless embryonic stem cells being used in research at this moment in that building". And then I imagined a group of black-clad special forces from Operation Rescue scaling the walls under cover of darkness with night vision goggles, to liberate the stem cells about to be "executed". Great premise for an action movie, right? Wrong, because to most people - even, I bet, anti-stem-cell types, it's ridiculous. And there's another question: if you run across someone who's adamantly against the use of embryonic stem cells in research, ask them if it seems justified to them, and if not, why not? Would it not be morally equivalent to U.S. troops breaking someone out of a WWII concentration camp? In case there's a temptation for them to equivocate by saying "at least some good might come out of the research being done on the stem cells", there was medical research being done by Mengele et al at the camps too. Can that possibly make a difference in either case anyway?
Stem cell blogs here and here.
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Tax Protest as Another Conspiracy Theory-Cult
Over at ERV, a commenter (Joshua Zelinsky) made the following interesting observation:
Though I've often thought the same about tax protesters, I would disagree that wooers are more likely to buy into each other, with the large exception of individual-persecution-related woo. Yes, in the course of a life you can have several crazy ideas, but wooers usually are serial wooers; that is, you can only have one theory at a time that explains everything. And sometimes you need persecution wooery to help preserve it (case in point, chiropractors and creationists are often tax protesters, because the evil government is after them both, of course.) But you won't often find, say, a Truther who is also a creationist.
What I've found is that wooers are often offended that you would even associate them with those other crazy (non-persecution) theories. (There was the time I got yelled at for the egregious mistake of confusing the Ascended Brotherhood with the Lemurians, and no, it wasn't even at a Star Trek convention.)
But I agree with him that the whole tax protester thing is fascinating. It's as if they've "solved" the Constitution and now are legally Enlightened and above it. That idea is incoherent enough when applied to material reality, but to social constructs? Bizarre! There are lots of laws that people disagree with, but so far as I know, this is the only instance where a group of people think they can say a codeword (or a secret handshake or a cross or something like that) and agents of the law will have to stop pursuing them.
But maybe I'm not being fair; let's apply it to myself. Let's look at a case where there's a law that I (along with lots of other people) don't like and think is unconstitutional: the gay marriage ban on the books in California that passed in November 2008 (Prop 8). Do I think it's immoral? Yes. Do I think it is, and can be shown to be, unconstitutional? Yes. So what do I do - If I'm gay, do I march down to city hall and demand that they marry me and my husband, because in some seminar someone came up with some crazy legal theory that Prop 8 is unconstitutional? Of course not. What do I think that would accomplish? What are the tax people thinking?
If I had two lives, my second would be spent as a sociology professor, and I would build a compendium of all coherent conspiracy-theory based cults. Tax protesters, Truth-outers, AIDS-denialists, you name it. The qualifier would have to be that they have a social component (i.e., there are lots of physics crackpots, but not physics crackpot society or Center for Crackpot Studies, but there are tax protest leaders, like the one that Wesley Snipes got involved with.) I would also wonder why certain societies spawn more of them. Why the Burned Over District in nineteenth-century upstate New York? Why the propagation of cults in post-war Japan? Humans being the way they are, one virtue of such a profession would be job security.
(Josh, I would've emailed you to let you know I was using the quote but couldn't find your contact info.)
[A chiropractor also being a tax protester] seems to be part of the general pattern that people who care strongly about one form of woo are likely to buy into others as well. It is a strange pattern. The tax protesters are really one of the craziest groups out there. At least most forms of fringe beliefs rest on the notion that somehow they are resting on how they think the universe actually works. But things like taxes are inherently social constructs. If no one agrees with you, you're wrong.
Though I've often thought the same about tax protesters, I would disagree that wooers are more likely to buy into each other, with the large exception of individual-persecution-related woo. Yes, in the course of a life you can have several crazy ideas, but wooers usually are serial wooers; that is, you can only have one theory at a time that explains everything. And sometimes you need persecution wooery to help preserve it (case in point, chiropractors and creationists are often tax protesters, because the evil government is after them both, of course.) But you won't often find, say, a Truther who is also a creationist.
What I've found is that wooers are often offended that you would even associate them with those other crazy (non-persecution) theories. (There was the time I got yelled at for the egregious mistake of confusing the Ascended Brotherhood with the Lemurians, and no, it wasn't even at a Star Trek convention.)
But I agree with him that the whole tax protester thing is fascinating. It's as if they've "solved" the Constitution and now are legally Enlightened and above it. That idea is incoherent enough when applied to material reality, but to social constructs? Bizarre! There are lots of laws that people disagree with, but so far as I know, this is the only instance where a group of people think they can say a codeword (or a secret handshake or a cross or something like that) and agents of the law will have to stop pursuing them.
But maybe I'm not being fair; let's apply it to myself. Let's look at a case where there's a law that I (along with lots of other people) don't like and think is unconstitutional: the gay marriage ban on the books in California that passed in November 2008 (Prop 8). Do I think it's immoral? Yes. Do I think it is, and can be shown to be, unconstitutional? Yes. So what do I do - If I'm gay, do I march down to city hall and demand that they marry me and my husband, because in some seminar someone came up with some crazy legal theory that Prop 8 is unconstitutional? Of course not. What do I think that would accomplish? What are the tax people thinking?
If I had two lives, my second would be spent as a sociology professor, and I would build a compendium of all coherent conspiracy-theory based cults. Tax protesters, Truth-outers, AIDS-denialists, you name it. The qualifier would have to be that they have a social component (i.e., there are lots of physics crackpots, but not physics crackpot society or Center for Crackpot Studies, but there are tax protest leaders, like the one that Wesley Snipes got involved with.) I would also wonder why certain societies spawn more of them. Why the Burned Over District in nineteenth-century upstate New York? Why the propagation of cults in post-war Japan? Humans being the way they are, one virtue of such a profession would be job security.
(Josh, I would've emailed you to let you know I was using the quote but couldn't find your contact info.)
A Welcome Addition to the Ranks of Quack Watchers: SkeptVet
A shout-out to the SkeptVet blog. SkeptVet takes a science-based medicine approach to all forms of alternative/homeopathic quackery and to related moral and medical issues.
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
The Church of Rome and the Nazis
What is my point in beating this dead horse? First and foremost, the horse isn't dead. In the End of Faith, Sam Harris pointed out the incredible fact that not a single person was excommunicated from the Catholic Church as a result of the Holocaust. Not a single one! That there exists this pattern of behavior is far worse than one person (Hitler) having been Catholic, though my recent observations thereon have yielded the usual quibbling; e.g., Hitler wasn't Catholic because he hadn't gone to church much since 1934 (I guess bin Laden isn't Muslim then either). There were also the usual outcries that atheists are fundamentalists. Yes, I'm fundamentally against innocent people being executed en masse. I'm willing to condemn that categorically. You got me there!
The point is this: any organization which claims that it is the office of God on Earth, and therefore the source for true morality, should not be surprised that its actions are held up to close scrutiny. To that end, I'm not even making an argument that there was institutional support for fascism in the Church - though, it bears pointing out, John Paul II and Benedict both admitted (a little too late) at least to sins of omission in this regard. That the Vatican disliked this or that particular aspect of Naziism is not quite enough to restore moral confidence in the Church. The point is that the highest-ranking representatives of God on this planet - that is, Popes Pius XI and XII - clearly knew of the positions and later the deliberate actions of some of their high officials, and reacted in ways that might be called morally inadequate.
How so? To take one example: Austrian bishop Alois Hudal was not just a Nazi sympathizer - after the war he actively helped Nazis escape. Granted, Pius XI found his vocal support for the Nazis problematic. So what did the Pope do to Hudal? Did he fire him, excommunicate him, condemn his crimes? No - he even let him stay in the Vatican! Ah - but he isolated him.
Bishop Alois Hudal.
Remember mid-September 2001, when the United States demanded that the Taliban government of Afghanistan turn over Osama bin Laden? Not surprisingly, the Taliban leader Mullah Omar refused. But do you remember what he said? Clumsily playing a game of not selling out the man who supported his theocratic government while simultaneously trying to placate the country whose bombers were fueling up at that very moment, Omar said he had taken bin Laden's fax machine away. Yes, really.
Now this kind of political equivocating might make sense in an organization about to be pulverized by the U.S. Air Force, or surrounded by Axis powers. Unless of course that organization was headed by the most powerful being in the universe, against whose might cruise missiles and Panzers are useless. Right? Even ignoring that particular problem for the moment, in the case of the Hudal, the church had many opportunities to correct the 1938 oversight by more forcefully ejecting him from their ranks - and by "many" opportunities, I mean "one for every goddamn day for the next 14 years". And of course, after the war didn't go his way, Hudal went from advocating for the Nazis to actively organization Nazi escapes along the ratline. One of the escapees was a banal fellow you may have heard of named Eichmann. Hudal's ratline activities were made public by a Catholic publication in 1947, and finally Hudal abdicated in 1952.
Now stop to think for a second how that would play out today. Let's say that tomorrow the press discovers that the head of the Department of the Interior had helped Nazis escape - and all the President does is give him a lateral transfer into a dead end job in some out-of-the-way obscure branch of the Federal bureacracy, to keep him out of the sun and away from the media. Would you not be outraged? I sure as hell would be. I would start to wonder what kind of country I was living in - and (critical difference) the Federal government does not even claim to be divinely sanctioned.
The Nuremberg trials. Somehow the Allies knew what to do with Nazis.
Well, that's not a fair comparison, you might chime in. You're comparing apples and oranges; things were different in 1945 than they are today, and it's easy to see after the fact imposing a modern viewpoint that the handling of the ratliners was wrong. Ah, I see - now morality shifts with the times, huh? You mean the ten bullet points on that Bronze Age Powerpoint slide you claim to live your life by are NOT really the end-all be-all of morality? It is here that, as a patriotic American, I am pleased to report that my government had no problem figuring out who the bad guys were back then, and what to do with them. The same can be said for the other governments with whom we joined in the effort.
You might object that I don't understand European culture, or the customs of the Church; the Church couldn't just fire or excommunicate him, because that's not how they do things, he had to save face, to understand their actions I must respect the traditions of the organization, etc. And these are all excellent points - if we were talking about secular, worldly organizations like the government of Hungary or General Motors. I would think that if you really believe your institution is invested with the supernatural might and moral clarity of the most powerful being in the universe, you would hold it to better standards. Even leaving aside the question of whether there is a God, He doesn't seem to have much to do with this particular religion. In fact, this kind of politicking is exactly what we should expect to see if the organization in question is a wordly, godless enterprise devoid of any interest except self-perpetuation. And once again let's bring it back into focus: we're not just talking about a guy who embezzled funds. Hudal was helping Nazis escape justice. If that's not wrong, what is? So save your newfound moral relativism for the next discussion of gay marriage or stem cell research.
But maybe deciding on a real punishment for Hudal got stuck in Pius XII's inbox (although again, as he was the representative of God on Earth and so presumably has divine office management skills, I fail to see how such a thing could happen). So let's forget about Hudal - what about the at least thousands of other lay Catholics who participated directly in the Holocaust - and who the Church didn't see a need to excommunicate? If Hell exists, can there possibly be a better ticket in than being a guard at a death camp? Notice, I'm not arguing that being Catholic made SS guards evil - I'm just wondering what went through Pius XII's mind that kept him from noticing, or caring.
Right now, the mullahs in Iran are going through the same political maneuvering and interpretations of the Qu'ran that, surprisingly, justify their own grip on power, just like you would expect of a not-supernatural-at-all, worldly institution that survives on rhetoric and oppression rather than creating value. Sound familiar? I don't think there's anything special about the Church of Rome, except its size and its long, exceptionally well-documented history. (Of course if you ask the Thomas More Law Center; just daring to say out loud that you disagree with Vatican policy is hate speech. Someone should tell them it's not 1400.) If indeed the Church is just a big, rich, old, wordly institution that claims to be the source of morality, we should expect that occasionally its desire to perpetuate itself would conflict with its claims to represent absolute moral truth. (Of course, I'm assuming here that readers share my assumption that helping Nazis escape is bad.) In those cases, the Church would occasionally issue indirect, mumbling apologies for moral issues on which the civilized world had come to agreement decades ago, of how really the whole time unbaptized babies weren't in hell, or really the whole time slavery and anti-Semitism were bad even though they had been saying otherwise. In that vein, in a few decades I expect some doubletalk about about how they never really meant to imply that, for example, condoms don't protect against AIDS.
So what? You say. If you're Catholic, you might even be a cafeteria Catholic; you might keep going to church because you like the rituals, the churches are pretty, it reminds you of childhood, or your family will be disappointed; even if you don't actually believe in God, as some attending Catholics have confided in me. Even if you're willing to grant that it's all a big exercise in make-believe, ask yourself if you want to be part of the same organization that couldn't bother to excommunicate Alois Hudal.
The point is this: any organization which claims that it is the office of God on Earth, and therefore the source for true morality, should not be surprised that its actions are held up to close scrutiny. To that end, I'm not even making an argument that there was institutional support for fascism in the Church - though, it bears pointing out, John Paul II and Benedict both admitted (a little too late) at least to sins of omission in this regard. That the Vatican disliked this or that particular aspect of Naziism is not quite enough to restore moral confidence in the Church. The point is that the highest-ranking representatives of God on this planet - that is, Popes Pius XI and XII - clearly knew of the positions and later the deliberate actions of some of their high officials, and reacted in ways that might be called morally inadequate.
How so? To take one example: Austrian bishop Alois Hudal was not just a Nazi sympathizer - after the war he actively helped Nazis escape. Granted, Pius XI found his vocal support for the Nazis problematic. So what did the Pope do to Hudal? Did he fire him, excommunicate him, condemn his crimes? No - he even let him stay in the Vatican! Ah - but he isolated him.
Remember mid-September 2001, when the United States demanded that the Taliban government of Afghanistan turn over Osama bin Laden? Not surprisingly, the Taliban leader Mullah Omar refused. But do you remember what he said? Clumsily playing a game of not selling out the man who supported his theocratic government while simultaneously trying to placate the country whose bombers were fueling up at that very moment, Omar said he had taken bin Laden's fax machine away. Yes, really.
Now this kind of political equivocating might make sense in an organization about to be pulverized by the U.S. Air Force, or surrounded by Axis powers. Unless of course that organization was headed by the most powerful being in the universe, against whose might cruise missiles and Panzers are useless. Right? Even ignoring that particular problem for the moment, in the case of the Hudal, the church had many opportunities to correct the 1938 oversight by more forcefully ejecting him from their ranks - and by "many" opportunities, I mean "one for every goddamn day for the next 14 years". And of course, after the war didn't go his way, Hudal went from advocating for the Nazis to actively organization Nazi escapes along the ratline. One of the escapees was a banal fellow you may have heard of named Eichmann. Hudal's ratline activities were made public by a Catholic publication in 1947, and finally Hudal abdicated in 1952.
Now stop to think for a second how that would play out today. Let's say that tomorrow the press discovers that the head of the Department of the Interior had helped Nazis escape - and all the President does is give him a lateral transfer into a dead end job in some out-of-the-way obscure branch of the Federal bureacracy, to keep him out of the sun and away from the media. Would you not be outraged? I sure as hell would be. I would start to wonder what kind of country I was living in - and (critical difference) the Federal government does not even claim to be divinely sanctioned.
Well, that's not a fair comparison, you might chime in. You're comparing apples and oranges; things were different in 1945 than they are today, and it's easy to see after the fact imposing a modern viewpoint that the handling of the ratliners was wrong. Ah, I see - now morality shifts with the times, huh? You mean the ten bullet points on that Bronze Age Powerpoint slide you claim to live your life by are NOT really the end-all be-all of morality? It is here that, as a patriotic American, I am pleased to report that my government had no problem figuring out who the bad guys were back then, and what to do with them. The same can be said for the other governments with whom we joined in the effort.
You might object that I don't understand European culture, or the customs of the Church; the Church couldn't just fire or excommunicate him, because that's not how they do things, he had to save face, to understand their actions I must respect the traditions of the organization, etc. And these are all excellent points - if we were talking about secular, worldly organizations like the government of Hungary or General Motors. I would think that if you really believe your institution is invested with the supernatural might and moral clarity of the most powerful being in the universe, you would hold it to better standards. Even leaving aside the question of whether there is a God, He doesn't seem to have much to do with this particular religion. In fact, this kind of politicking is exactly what we should expect to see if the organization in question is a wordly, godless enterprise devoid of any interest except self-perpetuation. And once again let's bring it back into focus: we're not just talking about a guy who embezzled funds. Hudal was helping Nazis escape justice. If that's not wrong, what is? So save your newfound moral relativism for the next discussion of gay marriage or stem cell research.
But maybe deciding on a real punishment for Hudal got stuck in Pius XII's inbox (although again, as he was the representative of God on Earth and so presumably has divine office management skills, I fail to see how such a thing could happen). So let's forget about Hudal - what about the at least thousands of other lay Catholics who participated directly in the Holocaust - and who the Church didn't see a need to excommunicate? If Hell exists, can there possibly be a better ticket in than being a guard at a death camp? Notice, I'm not arguing that being Catholic made SS guards evil - I'm just wondering what went through Pius XII's mind that kept him from noticing, or caring.
Right now, the mullahs in Iran are going through the same political maneuvering and interpretations of the Qu'ran that, surprisingly, justify their own grip on power, just like you would expect of a not-supernatural-at-all, worldly institution that survives on rhetoric and oppression rather than creating value. Sound familiar? I don't think there's anything special about the Church of Rome, except its size and its long, exceptionally well-documented history. (Of course if you ask the Thomas More Law Center; just daring to say out loud that you disagree with Vatican policy is hate speech. Someone should tell them it's not 1400.) If indeed the Church is just a big, rich, old, wordly institution that claims to be the source of morality, we should expect that occasionally its desire to perpetuate itself would conflict with its claims to represent absolute moral truth. (Of course, I'm assuming here that readers share my assumption that helping Nazis escape is bad.) In those cases, the Church would occasionally issue indirect, mumbling apologies for moral issues on which the civilized world had come to agreement decades ago, of how really the whole time unbaptized babies weren't in hell, or really the whole time slavery and anti-Semitism were bad even though they had been saying otherwise. In that vein, in a few decades I expect some doubletalk about about how they never really meant to imply that, for example, condoms don't protect against AIDS.
So what? You say. If you're Catholic, you might even be a cafeteria Catholic; you might keep going to church because you like the rituals, the churches are pretty, it reminds you of childhood, or your family will be disappointed; even if you don't actually believe in God, as some attending Catholics have confided in me. Even if you're willing to grant that it's all a big exercise in make-believe, ask yourself if you want to be part of the same organization that couldn't bother to excommunicate Alois Hudal.
Typically Gentle Words from Hitchens
"It is a mistake to assume that the ayatollahs, cynical and corrupt as they may be, are acting rationally. They are frequently in the grip of archaic beliefs and fears that would make a stupefied medieval European peasant seem mentally sturdy and resourceful by comparison."
From "Iranian Leaders Will Always Believe Anglo-Saxons are Plotting Against Them," in Slate.
From "Iranian Leaders Will Always Believe Anglo-Saxons are Plotting Against Them," in Slate.
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Conspiracy Theories, Magical Thinking, and Democracy
This morning on Terry Gross there was a great interview with Chip Berlet, who wrote a paper called "Toxic to Democracy: Conspiracy Theories, Demonization, and Scapegoating". I've written before about denialists and conspiracy theorists - they're kind of neat to dissect, compare and contrast, that is until they get elected or kill some police.
The central thesis of Berlet's paper is that there has been an uptick in activity by white supremacist and anti-Semitic conspiracy-theory-oriented groups since the election of Obama, and that their focus on secretiveness, conspiracy theories, and ethnic hatred is corrosive to democracy. No surprise there.
His most interesting point was his emphasis on the magical thinking component of conspiracy theories. He went to the other end of the political spectrum, and used the 9/11 Truthers as his example on this: rabid Truthers have the idea that there is an evil cabal within the U.S. government that caused 9/11 (or allowed it to happen), and that once this conspiracy is exposed to everyone, the world's problems will be solved. Focusing on this strange leap is a good approach. Conspiracy theorists obsessed with revealing some deception or central Truth don't talk much about what the effect will be. So there's something for you to ask the next time you're online or waiting in line somewhere, talking to an AIDS denialist, or a vaccines-cause-autism nut, or a Truther, or an Obama-birth-certificate maniac. Ask them to imagine the next day after their particular truth is revealed to the world. How will the world be different? Will poverty be ended, or hunger, or disease? Will dogs and cats play together peacefully? Or (assuming for this thought experiment that their theory is true) will we be just one tiny incremental step better off?
Interestingly, in the case of many creationists, they do directly assert that the day after everyone stops believing in evolution, that peace will break out, and racism will disappear, along with homosexuality, rock music, and drug abuse. (Always a fun discussion: what, exactly, is the link between say chaperone proteins and finches on one hand, and LSD and Pantera on the other?) Same question for conspiracy theorists: walk me through the anticipated process of revelation. Will the clouds part? With the seas boil and the skies fall On That Day?
In the meantime, you might try making a bet with them, and at least getting some cash out of the deal. Remember, it's okay to take advantage of socially functional top-down thinkers!
The central thesis of Berlet's paper is that there has been an uptick in activity by white supremacist and anti-Semitic conspiracy-theory-oriented groups since the election of Obama, and that their focus on secretiveness, conspiracy theories, and ethnic hatred is corrosive to democracy. No surprise there.
His most interesting point was his emphasis on the magical thinking component of conspiracy theories. He went to the other end of the political spectrum, and used the 9/11 Truthers as his example on this: rabid Truthers have the idea that there is an evil cabal within the U.S. government that caused 9/11 (or allowed it to happen), and that once this conspiracy is exposed to everyone, the world's problems will be solved. Focusing on this strange leap is a good approach. Conspiracy theorists obsessed with revealing some deception or central Truth don't talk much about what the effect will be. So there's something for you to ask the next time you're online or waiting in line somewhere, talking to an AIDS denialist, or a vaccines-cause-autism nut, or a Truther, or an Obama-birth-certificate maniac. Ask them to imagine the next day after their particular truth is revealed to the world. How will the world be different? Will poverty be ended, or hunger, or disease? Will dogs and cats play together peacefully? Or (assuming for this thought experiment that their theory is true) will we be just one tiny incremental step better off?
Interestingly, in the case of many creationists, they do directly assert that the day after everyone stops believing in evolution, that peace will break out, and racism will disappear, along with homosexuality, rock music, and drug abuse. (Always a fun discussion: what, exactly, is the link between say chaperone proteins and finches on one hand, and LSD and Pantera on the other?) Same question for conspiracy theorists: walk me through the anticipated process of revelation. Will the clouds part? With the seas boil and the skies fall On That Day?
In the meantime, you might try making a bet with them, and at least getting some cash out of the deal. Remember, it's okay to take advantage of socially functional top-down thinkers!
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Extremely Belated Shout Out to the Meming of Life
Just wanted to thank the Meming of Life and give them a shout-out for liking and mentioning my Materialist Transcendence post a while back. Atheist parents and families, there are tons of resources out there for you, and that blog is one of the greatest - as is Camp Quest, the secular summer camp!
Talk is Cheap...So Charge for Being Wrong
It's not news that human beings are bad critical thinkers who use language inexactly. Listen to someone - anyone - for five minutes and count the questionable, or more often meaningless, statements they make. Of course, we base our relationships largely on trust and know that even if our pal is talking a lot of nonsense (just like we are), s/he means well.
That's why in psychology, if you want to design an experiment that reliably shows what people really believe about the world, you design it with a financial reward or penalty. Of course, we take part in these kinds of experiments all the time. Futures markets like intrade.com are excellent - and a good option for creationists who insist that the foundations of evolution are about to crumble. ("When? One year? Ten years? I'll take that. Just put the money in escrow please." Odd how rarely these yahoos actually have the courage of their convictions.) People have even suggested pinning down political pundits and even scientists by penalizing them financially for being wrong. James Randi has been penalizing psychics and dowsers for years by not giving them a million dollars. Less exotically, of course there's also the stock market, and of course there's just plain old betting too.
And of course this suggests a different rhetorical angle from the one traditionally taken by rationalists: don't debate, just bet. It's a fun game to look how quickly the bravado and feigned beliefs of creationists and denialists of all stripes evaporate (or are papered over with excuses) once there's money in the deal. A cousin of mine who's given to conspiracy theories once told me - heatedly, because I wouldn't take him on faith - that the U.S. dollar would soon be replaced by the Amero, you know, New World Order, Bilderburgers, black helicopters etc. So I tried to bet him a hundred dollars (or the equivalent in Ameros if he was right) - and I even offered to let him pick the period (would it happen in one year? Five?) He proceeded to back out by telling me with a straight face that betting was immoral. But it shut him up; I never heard about Ameros again.
There are other questions for believers lurking at the intersection of atheism and finance. For example - why do insurance companies not bother asking how many people pray for you? Is it because there's a big atheist insurance company conspiracy hiding the power of prayer, or is it becaue talking to yourself with folded hands does nothing? Why do people who are formally prohibited from certain economic activities (charging interest, opening businesses on certain days) seek out infidels to create clever workarounds - are infidels invisible to God? Do Young Earth Creationists check their 401ks carefully to be sure they're not throwing their money away investing in these crazy companies like ExxonMobil that drill in the wrong place for oil because they think the world is billions of years old (no wonder we're running out of oil!) Do they refuse to buy gas at Sinclair because there's a frickin dinosaur right on the sign? Do creationists and homeopathic charlatans and AIDS denialists refuse medical treatment that uses the full set of tools from modern biology and chemistry? Yes, I know - a few of them do; most don't.
So the question is: why, in almost every case where their health and money are on the line, do these people behave exactly the same way that a materialist does?
A good question, if a little general. Fortunately it's very easy to ask more specific questions - profitably. At best, you get a little richer. Most of the time, they'll back out, but at least they're quieter.
Hey Everyone! Homeopathic Remedies Can Hurt You!
Somehow it's escaping the press's notice that Zicam is a homeopathic remedy. Time to get rid of the silly idea that homeopathy can't hurt you - it does, both passively (in terms of people staying sick) and actively, as in this case. (Just like all-natural things can hurt you. Remember kava?). But Zicam hurt people, and Zicam is homeopathic. Zicam is homeopathic. Zicam is homeopathic. (Sorry, sometimes things bear repeating when people have trouble remembering.)
What now? Let's have an excuse anticipation party. Other popular times to have these are after an important gap-bridging fossil is discovered or a new study is published showing no link between vaccines and autism. What new and exciting excuses will homeopathic apologists make?
- Zicam has (too much zinc, too little zinc, synthetic ingredients, bad karma) in it, therefore it's not really homeopathic. In which case, you might ask them, at what point did you come to this sudden convenient realization? Five minutes after the Zicam story broke, or ten minutes after? Why only distance yourself now?
- It's a conspiracy. Those people's loss of smell came from (overhead powerlines, ibuprofen, bad chakras) and the (evil government, pharmaceutical industry, doctors, people with three-digit-IQs) are against us.
- There's no link proven; more studies are required. Wow! Just like HIV denialists and mass-polluters.
Can you think of any others? I'm sure the snake-oil salesmen at the Herbalifes and Elephant Pharmacies will!
What now? Let's have an excuse anticipation party. Other popular times to have these are after an important gap-bridging fossil is discovered or a new study is published showing no link between vaccines and autism. What new and exciting excuses will homeopathic apologists make?
- Zicam has (too much zinc, too little zinc, synthetic ingredients, bad karma) in it, therefore it's not really homeopathic. In which case, you might ask them, at what point did you come to this sudden convenient realization? Five minutes after the Zicam story broke, or ten minutes after? Why only distance yourself now?
- It's a conspiracy. Those people's loss of smell came from (overhead powerlines, ibuprofen, bad chakras) and the (evil government, pharmaceutical industry, doctors, people with three-digit-IQs) are against us.
- There's no link proven; more studies are required. Wow! Just like HIV denialists and mass-polluters.
Can you think of any others? I'm sure the snake-oil salesmen at the Herbalifes and Elephant Pharmacies will!
Monday, June 15, 2009
Too Eager to Believe? A Pro-Life Blogger and Her Followers
Beccah Beushausen is a Chicago-area blogger who told readers she was pregnant with a terminally ill baby that she was still going to have. She became a rallying point for the (mostly conservative Christian) anti-abortion movement. And she was lying.
For us atheists, the temptation is there to jump on this and say "just one more example of lying for Jesus". But in the articles about her that I've read so far, Beushausen just seems to be suffering from a need for attention that overpowered her moral sense, rather than someone who lied in the service of an ideology - and she happened to find an audience that was eager for her story.
I'm not a big fan of Christian family-planning clinics (which really are places to stop pregnant single women from considering abortions). But most of Beushausen's previous supporters seem to be doing the right thing and dissociating themselves from her (and returning any money that she brought in), except for a few.
For us atheists, the temptation is there to jump on this and say "just one more example of lying for Jesus". But in the articles about her that I've read so far, Beushausen just seems to be suffering from a need for attention that overpowered her moral sense, rather than someone who lied in the service of an ideology - and she happened to find an audience that was eager for her story.
I'm not a big fan of Christian family-planning clinics (which really are places to stop pregnant single women from considering abortions). But most of Beushausen's previous supporters seem to be doing the right thing and dissociating themselves from her (and returning any money that she brought in), except for a few.
Thursday, June 11, 2009
More Cool Science About Our Origins - Miller and Urey Would Be Proud
We're one step closer to understanding the transition from chemistry to life, thanks to this Scripps Institute research. This comes on the heels of an important discovery showing that the RNA World is not as difficult to get to prebiotically as we previously thought.
If you want an origin story, what could be more incredible than life and consciousness building itself out of the inert ashes of dead stars?
If you want an origin story, what could be more incredible than life and consciousness building itself out of the inert ashes of dead stars?
Your Day is Over
Get the divergence time for any two animals or groups of animals. Awesome. It's like Google Maps to the natural history of Earth. Hat tip to ERV.
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Boo Hoo, Someone Doesn't Like Me
Don't like the Vatican's policy against adoptions by same-sex couples? You're a Nazi! Really. According to the Thomas More Law Center, a Catholic advocacy group that I wrote about previously, the City of San Francisco is getting ready to round up Catholics in concentration camps, just because they dare call out the Vatican's institutional bigotry.
At this point it's worth subtly repeating, again, that HITLER WAS CATHOLIC, HITLER WAS CATHOLIC, HITLER WAS CATHOLIC, and the Vatican didn't bother excommunicating anybody for their actions after the war. It took secular states like the good old US of A and the Allies to punish them.
At this point it's worth subtly repeating, again, that HITLER WAS CATHOLIC, HITLER WAS CATHOLIC, HITLER WAS CATHOLIC, and the Vatican didn't bother excommunicating anybody for their actions after the war. It took secular states like the good old US of A and the Allies to punish them.
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
Lose Money at Gambling? Sue For Bad Feng Shui!
You have to admire the cajones on this guy. Not only does he skip the country with a 2 million dollar gambling debt, he threatens to sue the casino for bad Feng Shui. (Yes, really.) What, the craps table wasn't aligned with magnetic north for you, princess? No, it's even dumber than that:
Something bad happened, and you noticed some other object or event in your immediate physical environment? Well obviously there's a direct causal relationship! It must have been the towels. It can't be that you just noticed those towels first when you went back to your hotel room after blowing your money and associated them with the loss. You undisciplined dumbass.
In entirely related behavior: the psychologist B.F. Skinner noticed that, when he put pigeons in a cage that a) randomly provided food pellets (not because they pecked on a certain spot or behaved a certain way) and b) didn't give them enough, they got crazy: that is, they developed elaborate rituals of head and body movements that the pigeons, apparently, believed were connected to pellet delivery. Why always such complicated gyrations? The more elaborate, the harder it is for the stimulus-response pattern to undergo extinction. You might expect that the same phenomenon might occur in other animals - for example, in primates who think if they jump around and shout a certain way while wearing feathers and masks, that it will rain and make the crops grow.
This same principle also works in other primates who have PhDs in math and work on Wall Street and have a complicated formula for picking stocks, believing they'll always get rich because they've only been tested in an updraft (these primates are called quants and are an endangered species after our recent financial K/T boundary; hence Warren Buffett's admonition never to invest in a company whose business plan can't be drawn on a cocktail napkin). Bond trader Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes about this same effect in Fooled by Randomness and admits that even as a hard-headed financial contrarian who depends on his ability to outthink other humans by circumventing his own heuristics, he has on occasion developed his own pigeon rain dances. And your brilliant blogger must confess that once, while climbing solo in the Cascades, I got nervous and decided that I wouldn't swear while in sight of the mountain. Why? Someone I'd met on Mt. Hood told me he'd climbed Everest and stayed in base camp with the Sherpas for the whole season, and that to a person, every single casualty on the mountain that year had been people who cursed freely, apparently a big taboo to the Sherpa. In retrospect, probably not airtight data, but in principle still possible; it's the causal link that is necessarily B.S. Swearing doesn't make mountains buck you off. But we get nervous or excited, and our klugey old fight-or-flight systems take over more head space and we start making weird associations, oddly enough, exactly when we need to keep our heads clear. Thanks to evolution our heads are packed with legacy systems that make GM look cutting-edge.
So, Mr. Yuan, take it from Skinner: the white towels didn't make you lose money, and elaborate arrangements of objects and body movements can't make rain or food pellets or stock prices or people fall.
Yuan [the gambler] claims that the Venetian "dug a one-meter-square hole" into the wall of his suite (the presidential suite) and covered it with a black cloth. This is apparently bad feng shui, in addition to being weird, but the Venetian wasn't done. Next, it put two white towels in front of Yuan's suite, and "turned on two large fans facing his room without notifying him." After learning of these ominous portents, Yuan claims, his luck changed and he went from being up $400,000 to losing two million.
Something bad happened, and you noticed some other object or event in your immediate physical environment? Well obviously there's a direct causal relationship! It must have been the towels. It can't be that you just noticed those towels first when you went back to your hotel room after blowing your money and associated them with the loss. You undisciplined dumbass.
In entirely related behavior: the psychologist B.F. Skinner noticed that, when he put pigeons in a cage that a) randomly provided food pellets (not because they pecked on a certain spot or behaved a certain way) and b) didn't give them enough, they got crazy: that is, they developed elaborate rituals of head and body movements that the pigeons, apparently, believed were connected to pellet delivery. Why always such complicated gyrations? The more elaborate, the harder it is for the stimulus-response pattern to undergo extinction. You might expect that the same phenomenon might occur in other animals - for example, in primates who think if they jump around and shout a certain way while wearing feathers and masks, that it will rain and make the crops grow.
This same principle also works in other primates who have PhDs in math and work on Wall Street and have a complicated formula for picking stocks, believing they'll always get rich because they've only been tested in an updraft (these primates are called quants and are an endangered species after our recent financial K/T boundary; hence Warren Buffett's admonition never to invest in a company whose business plan can't be drawn on a cocktail napkin). Bond trader Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes about this same effect in Fooled by Randomness and admits that even as a hard-headed financial contrarian who depends on his ability to outthink other humans by circumventing his own heuristics, he has on occasion developed his own pigeon rain dances. And your brilliant blogger must confess that once, while climbing solo in the Cascades, I got nervous and decided that I wouldn't swear while in sight of the mountain. Why? Someone I'd met on Mt. Hood told me he'd climbed Everest and stayed in base camp with the Sherpas for the whole season, and that to a person, every single casualty on the mountain that year had been people who cursed freely, apparently a big taboo to the Sherpa. In retrospect, probably not airtight data, but in principle still possible; it's the causal link that is necessarily B.S. Swearing doesn't make mountains buck you off. But we get nervous or excited, and our klugey old fight-or-flight systems take over more head space and we start making weird associations, oddly enough, exactly when we need to keep our heads clear. Thanks to evolution our heads are packed with legacy systems that make GM look cutting-edge.
So, Mr. Yuan, take it from Skinner: the white towels didn't make you lose money, and elaborate arrangements of objects and body movements can't make rain or food pellets or stock prices or people fall.
Congratulations Osel!
We need you. Welcome! For English-speakers: his story here.
(Added later: in Osel's Wikipedia article it says he was at Burning Man 2007. Maybe that's what did it. I'm only half-joking. The only time I've ever experienced culture shock was driving from Burning Man after it ended to the Sacramento airport. Without trying to sound all Jimi Hendrix, the geographical distance was mcuh smaller than the experiential distance.)
(Added later: in Osel's Wikipedia article it says he was at Burning Man 2007. Maybe that's what did it. I'm only half-joking. The only time I've ever experienced culture shock was driving from Burning Man after it ended to the Sacramento airport. Without trying to sound all Jimi Hendrix, the geographical distance was mcuh smaller than the experiential distance.)
Sunday, June 7, 2009
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
Okay For Agencies to Criticize Harmful, Irrational Policies, Courts Say
San Francisco didn't cross into constitutionally forbidden territory of government hostility to religion when the Board of Supervisors denounced a Vatican order to Catholic Charities not to place adoptive children with same-sex couples, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday.
Religious organizations (Scientology, CAIR, the Vatican, etc.) typically regard any criticism as violations of their rights, hate speech, you name it - whatever overheated terminology matches their disbelief that someone would dare call them on their B.S. It's going on three centuries of Enlightenment now, and these jokers still seem constitutively unable to understand secular government and freedom of speech. Two words guys: "boo" and "hoo".
On the other side of the coin, I would ask Brian Rooney with Thomas More Law Center (which was the group that sued San Francisco) if all I need in his eyes to be legally protected from criticism is to be part of a religion. You think my mama dresses me funny? You can't say that! I'm a magic-stick worshipper so that's hate speech! That's oppression of religion!
I would ask Brian Rooney if he thinks my magic-stickism is valid grounds for such claims. I would guess not. But would it be because Rooney's faith is the only true one, and the only one that should be protected? (an honest answer for a Christian, if not one publicly palatable to most people in the U.S., theist or otherwise.) Or is it because I'm the only magic-stickian and as such my religion doesn't count - that is, the majority is always sane? While I would probably disagree with arguments made by those in Rooney's camp, I'm genuinely interested in what they might be.
Friday, May 29, 2009
Collins at the NIH
Francis Collins's selection as head of the NIH has generated a lot of buzz in the atheist blogosphere. The bottom line is this. By all indications he's a good scientist, and a good science administrator. He has some irrational beliefs, and so do you. Has he, in his professional life, made decisions based on those irrational beliefs? Or has he made the same decisions that an atheist would have? If he's able to keep his personal baggage from interfering in his work - something we all have to work on - then I don't see an issue.
If there were a logical choice for the post (based on qualifications) who happened to be a vocal atheist, and we were talking about a field of candidates, then I would probably be arguing against Collins. But that's not the situation we're in, and Collins has a good reputation even among atheists.
If there were a logical choice for the post (based on qualifications) who happened to be a vocal atheist, and we were talking about a field of candidates, then I would probably be arguing against Collins. But that's not the situation we're in, and Collins has a good reputation even among atheists.
Divide and Conquer
Here's a Jack Chick tract courtesy PZ Myers, which as PZ said boils down to "Catholicism and voodoo are pretty much the same thing, and any good Protestant boy can beat up demons." One of the successes of the Religious Right has been to level distinctions between faiths so that Catholics and Baptists and Mormons can vote together (note that in 2008 this became an issue for Romney, because many Americans thought he was in the wrong cult). I'm all for this tract spreading anywhere that Catholics and Protestants are needed for the Religious Right to get votes together - like the Southwest for example.
And I ask again: where are our tracts? At what motel desks and grocery store breezeways can regular people going through tough times found positive atheist messages? I keep threatening to put one of these together and distribute it myself, but I challenge the community to beat me to it.
And I ask again: where are our tracts? At what motel desks and grocery store breezeways can regular people going through tough times found positive atheist messages? I keep threatening to put one of these together and distribute it myself, but I challenge the community to beat me to it.
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Science Cafes
Here's something nifty - science social discussion groups springing up all over the world. I don't want to confuse my message that what we need more of is athletes and lawyers and marketers and just regular working moms and dads. But there are still plenty of us who came to disbelief through science, as Sam Harris says, because there's something about science profoundly hostile to religious thinking. Check it out.
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
A Thoughtful Response from a Theist
I frequently browse articles that came up on Google News for "atheist"; judging by the comment sections of these articles, I'm not the only atheist who does so. Recently I ran across Randal Rauser's Christian-viewpoint cost-benefit analysis of atheism.
I can't say Rauser hits any new points, though he presents them from a new angle. I offered a response, included here with all its hastily-typed mistakes:
I was surprised by pleased to see a well-intentioned and thoughtful answer from Rauser not only to my posts, but to most, even if I don't agree with them:
Have thoughts to add? Feel free to visit the article, but do Rauser and the rest of us the favor of having a quality exchange and entering the discussion with positive intentions.
I can't say Rauser hits any new points, though he presents them from a new angle. I offered a response, included here with all its hastily-typed mistakes:
Mr. Rauser,
Your cost-benefit analysis of religion and atheism is absolutely an appropriate and clear-headed way to approach these important questions - but you must not have talked to many atheists. This vacuum of purpose that you think we all exist in is just not there. You could either assume that I (and the other atheist respondents on here) are telling the truth and try to figure out how this could be, or you could assume that we're all hateful and lying just so we can drag you down into the abyss along with us.
I'm sure that you wrote this column out of a sincere attempt to live your life better and make the world a better place. That's great, but of course we disagree on the details, which is why we it's great that we live in a country where we can have these discussions. So to use your same terminology: I am "for" loving my wife, doing a good job at my career (soon-to-be doctor), making the world a better place, and enjoying myself while I do it (with a nice Hefeweizen or a long run in the hills near where I live). This level of fulfillment is common to atheists. We get to pick what we're "for". On the other hand, I have to agree with you that Treadwell was a little "off" going and hanging out with grizzlies. I think he would've been better off staying in Southern California and volunteering to do beach cleanup or work in a battered women's shelter. I think you might even agree with me! But where does that agreement come from? Your innate moral sense? Or the Bible? Where in the Bible does it mention meaning?
In closing Mr. Rauser, maybe for you have trouble understanding that your wife, or your kids, or your job, are reasons enough for you to go on living, and unlike the rest of us, you need someone else to explain to you why they're important. But you know what? I don't really believe that's true. You've just been told since you were young that you can't love your family and lead a good and moral and purposeful life without the stories in the Bible, but take it from me, you can. I'll be out for a nice long run on Sunday morning - and I'd love to see you out there on the trails!
I was surprised by pleased to see a well-intentioned and thoughtful answer from Rauser not only to my posts, but to most, even if I don't agree with them:
Mike,
Let me repeat, I am not denying that you can lead a happy and fulfilled life as a non-theist. (While we're on the topic, that old adage about there being no atheists in foxholes is not quite true. Watch the great documentary "Touching the Void" for an example of an atheist who stared death in the face and had no inkling to become a theist.)
The point is not that you cannot lead a fulfilled life. The point, rather, is that your worldview lacks the metaphysical ground for the absolute value and meaning that makes your life worthwhile. I'm pointing out an inconsistency. And all the attempts to ground moral value and meaning in biological adaptation merely reinforce my point.
--RD Rauser
Have thoughts to add? Feel free to visit the article, but do Rauser and the rest of us the favor of having a quality exchange and entering the discussion with positive intentions.
Atheism as a Political Problem in Iceland
At the Friendly Atheist, Hemant Mehta brings us a success story of political symbolism, where an atheist group in Iceland provided a secular alternative to the opening of the Icelandic legislature. Hemant cautions that this would be much harder in the U.S., which is probably true - after all, things are different in a country with a population smaller than that of Oakland, California. But the point is made that such success stories can happen, and I hope echoes from this will be felt throughout the West, even from the modest people of Iceland. I for one am not surprised - this is, after all, the country the brought us the saga of the medieval atheist Hrafnkell.
Friday, May 22, 2009
Support Stem Cell Research
Previously I made a list of political issues important to atheists, and stem cell research was on it. Public comments are still open for new NIH stem cell guidelines. To put it mildly, there's a need for more non-fundamentalist comment. More, including the link to the NIH submission site, is here; direct link to NIH comment page is here.
Monday, May 18, 2009
San Francisco Atheist Film Festival June 28th
The first annual Atheist Film Festival is coming up next month at the historic Roxie Theater in San Francisco, June 28th. Details here. Never seen Monty Python's The Meaning of Life on the big screen? Now's your chance!
Exposing People to More Religions is Good
I recently saw this write-up for a website called Patheos, which has information about a hundred religions. When I run across these kinds of websites I'm not as bothered as I am when I read about megachurches or madrassahs.
Why? It's hard to remain a fundmentalist when you see some of the details of other religions - and you can see the patterns in common with your own. And non-fundamentalist theists aren't as hungry for political power. This is one of the beneficial effects of exposing kids to multiple religions. It's also consistent with fundamentalists' phobia of same.
Atheist activism boils down to two separate classes of goals:
1) The public question - this is what I mean when I say that atheism is primarily a political problem. This is the big one. We're continuing the effort begun in earnest in the Enlightenment (in the United States, might I add patriotically) to keep religion out of public life.
2) The private question - this is what individuals believe. While the world would be better off without religion and its other more irrational beliefs, it's neither moral nor possible to force people to give up those beliefs individually. It is possible, however, or I (and you) wouldn't be involved in the discussion that point #1 above makes possible in the first place.
Of course as long as religion exists individually, it can't leave alone the public sphere, and so as Hitchens quoted Camus, it's always waiting in the sewers to send up its rats to die in the streets of a happy - or enlightened - city.
Why? It's hard to remain a fundmentalist when you see some of the details of other religions - and you can see the patterns in common with your own. And non-fundamentalist theists aren't as hungry for political power. This is one of the beneficial effects of exposing kids to multiple religions. It's also consistent with fundamentalists' phobia of same.
Atheist activism boils down to two separate classes of goals:
1) The public question - this is what I mean when I say that atheism is primarily a political problem. This is the big one. We're continuing the effort begun in earnest in the Enlightenment (in the United States, might I add patriotically) to keep religion out of public life.
2) The private question - this is what individuals believe. While the world would be better off without religion and its other more irrational beliefs, it's neither moral nor possible to force people to give up those beliefs individually. It is possible, however, or I (and you) wouldn't be involved in the discussion that point #1 above makes possible in the first place.
Of course as long as religion exists individually, it can't leave alone the public sphere, and so as Hitchens quoted Camus, it's always waiting in the sewers to send up its rats to die in the streets of a happy - or enlightened - city.
Sunday, May 17, 2009
The Dalai Lama, Jerry Falwell, Richard Dawkins: Which One Doesn't Belong
I'd written before about the evolving atheist view of Buddhism, which was recently the subject of posts at Unreasonable Faith and Andrew Sullivan's blog. Essentially, I've noticed that Buddhism gets something of a free pass from secular-minded Westerners otherwise intolerant of religion as a political institution. After all, Sam Harris was once a bodyguard for the Dalai Lama (no kidding!)
John Horgan's 2003 Slate piece on why he quit Buddhism prompted this interesting response from a Sullivan reader:
I mentioned in my previous article my own post-adolescent dalliance with Buddhism, and how Msr. Hitchens was able to disillusion me, even at this late date, of the sentimental thoughts I still harbored for it (here's one example of Buddhism's warts). I feel I must echo Sullivan's reader and Hitchens, having just heard an interview with Robert Thurman recorded a few months ago. Thurman is a Buddhist and academic who is probably one of the Dalai Lama's strongest spokespeople in the U.S. Among other bromides he stated that atheists are just as fundamentalist as Christian evangelists ("Wow! We've never heard that before!") and referred to Richard Dawkins as the atheist Jerry Falwell. Even getting beyond that, Thurman was making ludicrous claims that would have been pointedly questioned were he an authority on anything but religion. Forget the unproveable celestial mutterings: he even got basic quantitative, factual information wrong: Ming treasure ships were not 10 times the size of Columbus's ships.
Although Buddhism still doesn't have the fetish for getting into fights about the nature of those parts of reality we understand pretty well (like evolution), its practitioners still demonstrate the bad habit of making ludicrous claims and expecting everyone else to believe them. If you want to stay in touch with reality, why clutter your head with sutras? Why not, you know, just stay in touch with reality?
John Horgan's 2003 Slate piece on why he quit Buddhism prompted this interesting response from a Sullivan reader:
The readers' responses you posted were extremely interesting in the degree to which they tracked, often nearly verbatim, many of the more "rational", or "intelligent" criticisms of the Big Three "Angry Atheists". You know what I mean - Horgan must not be aware of this or that understanding of this or that doctrine; Horgan obviously doesn't understand what this or that adept was talking about; Horgan ignores the temporal good thoughts/works/results of Buddhism/Buddhists; Horgan (and Florien) are insultingly simplistic, dismissive and glib in the face of a vast and ancient philosophical tradition; Horgan is arrogant and Buddhists are humble; blah blah blah.
I mentioned in my previous article my own post-adolescent dalliance with Buddhism, and how Msr. Hitchens was able to disillusion me, even at this late date, of the sentimental thoughts I still harbored for it (here's one example of Buddhism's warts). I feel I must echo Sullivan's reader and Hitchens, having just heard an interview with Robert Thurman recorded a few months ago. Thurman is a Buddhist and academic who is probably one of the Dalai Lama's strongest spokespeople in the U.S. Among other bromides he stated that atheists are just as fundamentalist as Christian evangelists ("Wow! We've never heard that before!") and referred to Richard Dawkins as the atheist Jerry Falwell. Even getting beyond that, Thurman was making ludicrous claims that would have been pointedly questioned were he an authority on anything but religion. Forget the unproveable celestial mutterings: he even got basic quantitative, factual information wrong: Ming treasure ships were not 10 times the size of Columbus's ships.
Although Buddhism still doesn't have the fetish for getting into fights about the nature of those parts of reality we understand pretty well (like evolution), its practitioners still demonstrate the bad habit of making ludicrous claims and expecting everyone else to believe them. If you want to stay in touch with reality, why clutter your head with sutras? Why not, you know, just stay in touch with reality?
Dean Edell = Awesome Medical Call-in Show
I took a little trip to Mendocino National Forest today and while I like driving through the woods on dirt roads, you get a little tired of it after a while - and after scanning the AM dial I pulled in a broadcast by Dr. Dean Edell. I was immediately taken out by how enthusiastically he encouraged skepticism in his listeners. I suspected he might be one of us when he mentioned as an aside the recent work showing how RNA could have occurred prebiotically and explicitly calling out the implication that this removes the need for a deity in the process. Had I checked the Celebrity Atheists list I would've seen that he was on there - but above and beyond that, he has an entertaining show that I really enjoyed listening to. Check it out online.
Friday, May 15, 2009
Biblical Scholarship as Literary Criticism
Yet more excellent mainstream press about critical thinking about religion. I heard an interview with this cat Bart Ehrman on NPR not long ago and was really impressed. A religious studies prof at UNC, he's probably the best known Biblical scholar to the lay public. When he discusses religion, he discusses the facts of religion - facts which theists and atheists can agree on - and when I heard him, I realized that I didn't know if he was a believer, and didn't care. A good starting place to talk about religion with its adherents is a discussion on the facts of how the Bible was written, when, and by whom. There will be a lot more chances to do this, now that Angels and Demons is in theaters. As Daniel Dennett has proposed, teaching the facts of religion in public schools is an excellent idea!
Why? You'll find that most religious people don't know much about their Scripture, or their religion's early history. To have this information removes much of the aura of mystery that people need to divide the incoherent and miraculous events in the Scripture from their every day experience of how the world works. Take Beowulf for example. We still argue over who wrote it, and how and when, and where exactly the Geats were from or where Hrothgar's mead hall was located - which somehow makes it seem less jarring when the hero fights a monster under a lake. But if you read a blog entry claiming that he was visiting a friend in Manchester England, and one night after hitting the pubs they fought a monster under a lake, you'd probably think the explanation had more to do with good English ale than Grendel. You can buy a plane ticket to England, and you can read about it in the paper. You know with fair certainty that those kinds of things don't happen there.
I used to wonder why the church doesn't focus more on scriptural scholarship, but there's an obvious reason. When people start digging into the history of their scripture, and the history of the institution that has propagated the Word, and the actual geography of the various holy lands - it starts to seem mundane; explicable by non-miraculous processes. And then the questions begin. After all, look what happened to Ehrman. No good!
It's a cliche that atheists on average know the Bible better than Christians. But instead of going for the cheap-and-easy win (i.e., immediately pointing out the inconsistencies in the Gospel), why not next time try to have an even-toned discussion with Christians about the authorship of the books of the Bible, the order in which they were written, the reasons that the committee at the Council of Nicaea decided to keep some and get rid of others, the Arian heresy and the Marcionites and the whole nine yards about the early Church. That will bring some people out of their shell, even though many will be suspicious because, despite that the peasants are now literate and can read it for themselves, churches do a good job getting people to stay away from this kind of thinking. That's why in these conversations you don't even have to attack the Bible - you just have to sneak in under the door and get people to start thinking about their scripture like any other book. Which, of course, it is.
Why? You'll find that most religious people don't know much about their Scripture, or their religion's early history. To have this information removes much of the aura of mystery that people need to divide the incoherent and miraculous events in the Scripture from their every day experience of how the world works. Take Beowulf for example. We still argue over who wrote it, and how and when, and where exactly the Geats were from or where Hrothgar's mead hall was located - which somehow makes it seem less jarring when the hero fights a monster under a lake. But if you read a blog entry claiming that he was visiting a friend in Manchester England, and one night after hitting the pubs they fought a monster under a lake, you'd probably think the explanation had more to do with good English ale than Grendel. You can buy a plane ticket to England, and you can read about it in the paper. You know with fair certainty that those kinds of things don't happen there.
I used to wonder why the church doesn't focus more on scriptural scholarship, but there's an obvious reason. When people start digging into the history of their scripture, and the history of the institution that has propagated the Word, and the actual geography of the various holy lands - it starts to seem mundane; explicable by non-miraculous processes. And then the questions begin. After all, look what happened to Ehrman. No good!
It's a cliche that atheists on average know the Bible better than Christians. But instead of going for the cheap-and-easy win (i.e., immediately pointing out the inconsistencies in the Gospel), why not next time try to have an even-toned discussion with Christians about the authorship of the books of the Bible, the order in which they were written, the reasons that the committee at the Council of Nicaea decided to keep some and get rid of others, the Arian heresy and the Marcionites and the whole nine yards about the early Church. That will bring some people out of their shell, even though many will be suspicious because, despite that the peasants are now literate and can read it for themselves, churches do a good job getting people to stay away from this kind of thinking. That's why in these conversations you don't even have to attack the Bible - you just have to sneak in under the door and get people to start thinking about their scripture like any other book. Which, of course, it is.
Thursday, May 14, 2009
The Illuminati: Angels and Demons and Paranoid Priests
Don't worry, I didn't forget to take my meds today, though conspiracy theories are interesting. The movie based on Dan Brown's Angels and Demons is prompting a surge of interest in the Illuminati. I read the novel, and I join the Church of Rome in being offended by Mr. Brown's works, though likely for different reasons. (It was painful. Painful.) In the novel, at the convocation to choose a new Pope, the Illuminati (represented as an old conspiracy of scientists wishing to overthrow the church) has obtained antimatter, and is going to use it to wipe out the Vatican.
The Illuminati are the go-to organization for conspiracy theories, right up there with the Freemasons, the Templars (more popular in Europe and revived by Umberto Eco) and the John Birch Society's communists, who are apparently conducting the slowest infiltration of a country ever in history since they began it in 1950 and cleverly faked the collapse of the Soviet Union to fool us. In addition to the Illuminati, the Masons are the other conspiracy group that we hear the most ranting about. As I've often said about Area 51, if it's really a conspiracy, they're not doing a very good job of keeping it quiet considering I run across it on Google without even trying. (Same with Area 51 and the aliens. Hike up Mt. Charleston and you can look down onto the runway. My pictures aren't that great, but it's really not that secret.)
You can read all about the Illuminati and Masons online, and how they control the Fed, Microsoft, and the menu at Taco Bell. The persistence of conspiracy theories in general is testament to the human need to believe that someone is steering, even if they're malevolent, rather than accepting the in-some-ways much scarier reality that nobody understands what's going on. But I'm more interested in what it is about the Masons and Illuminati specifically that inspires such morbid fascination. The Masons, at least, still exist: my grandfather was one. I never quite understood what the Masons were up to, though when I asked my Sicilian stepfather if really weren't they the Anglo pretend mafia (along with the Elks Lodge) he said that was pretty close. I still have my grandfather's ring, though when I walk by the Federal Reserve Building in San Francisco it never opened any secret passages for me. Then again, my grandpa was an accountant in a lumberyard in Western Pennsylvania, and he was a good man, but I don't think he was controlling the Fed.
Even if the Illuminati haven't had a meeting for a while, they did exist at one time, and what they have in common with Freemasonry is that both developed as organizations of individuals who believed that reason, and not religion, was the way to a better world - in both science and government (classic liberalism). Growing out of an era of religious authority as they did, you can imagine that some degree of obfuscation would have been prudent, to avoid ending up like Copernicus or Galileo. Thought of this way, they don't seem so dark and conspiratorial, do they? Then again, you're a twenty-first century rationalist, not a nineteenth century member of the clergy or nobility, desperate to stop the spread of ideas about the power of human reason.
The Masons are not limited to the Anglophone world, and though there were several big names in early American history associated with Freemasonry (among them Washington, and don't pay too much attention to National Treasure), I've found that the association between the Masons and classical liberalism's insistence on separating church and state is clearer in the writings of the Spanish-speaking world. In Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, a priest complaining about the absurdity of a civil war says: "This is silly; the defenders of the faith of Christ destroy the church and the Masons order it rebuilt." The newly independent nations of Latin America often quickly set about secularizing the Church's lands - among them, California's mission system in the 1830s (Saint James Mission, Saint Joseph, Saint Francis - ever heard of those?) The later infamous Santa Anna was one of the chief executors of mission secularization but as soon as he'd had enough of democracy, found that the best move was to jump right back into bed with the Church: "...it is very true that I threw up my cap for liberty with great ardor, and perfect sincerity, but very soon found the folly of it. A hundred years to come my people will not be fit for liberty. They do not know what it is, unenlightened as they are, and under the influence of a Catholic clergy, a despotism is the proper government for them..."
So, you can understand how the large churches and ruling castes of Enlightenment Europe would be so paranoid about the proceedings of these well-educated bourgeoisie, who were re-marking the world but in hindsight were merely acting in accordance with what we now see as basic principles of reason: that the world can be understood, and we can live in it, through reason, rather than the authority of subjectively revealed religious truth.
When the Mason Benjamin Franklin said things like "Lighthouses are more helpful than churches", I can imagine the consternation of the religious establishment. Today, the Masons have become the conservative gentleman's club that my grandfather belonged to, precisely because there is no longer any need to creep around the edges of the religious establishment. If you or I or any reason-minded person were brought back to 1800, we would be good candidates to be Masons or Illuminati based on our modern outlooks. As it turns out, the priests were right to be paranoid, though it did them no good in the long run - because the shadow-dwellers are now the churches.
The Illuminati are the go-to organization for conspiracy theories, right up there with the Freemasons, the Templars (more popular in Europe and revived by Umberto Eco) and the John Birch Society's communists, who are apparently conducting the slowest infiltration of a country ever in history since they began it in 1950 and cleverly faked the collapse of the Soviet Union to fool us. In addition to the Illuminati, the Masons are the other conspiracy group that we hear the most ranting about. As I've often said about Area 51, if it's really a conspiracy, they're not doing a very good job of keeping it quiet considering I run across it on Google without even trying. (Same with Area 51 and the aliens. Hike up Mt. Charleston and you can look down onto the runway. My pictures aren't that great, but it's really not that secret.)
You can read all about the Illuminati and Masons online, and how they control the Fed, Microsoft, and the menu at Taco Bell. The persistence of conspiracy theories in general is testament to the human need to believe that someone is steering, even if they're malevolent, rather than accepting the in-some-ways much scarier reality that nobody understands what's going on. But I'm more interested in what it is about the Masons and Illuminati specifically that inspires such morbid fascination. The Masons, at least, still exist: my grandfather was one. I never quite understood what the Masons were up to, though when I asked my Sicilian stepfather if really weren't they the Anglo pretend mafia (along with the Elks Lodge) he said that was pretty close. I still have my grandfather's ring, though when I walk by the Federal Reserve Building in San Francisco it never opened any secret passages for me. Then again, my grandpa was an accountant in a lumberyard in Western Pennsylvania, and he was a good man, but I don't think he was controlling the Fed.
Even if the Illuminati haven't had a meeting for a while, they did exist at one time, and what they have in common with Freemasonry is that both developed as organizations of individuals who believed that reason, and not religion, was the way to a better world - in both science and government (classic liberalism). Growing out of an era of religious authority as they did, you can imagine that some degree of obfuscation would have been prudent, to avoid ending up like Copernicus or Galileo. Thought of this way, they don't seem so dark and conspiratorial, do they? Then again, you're a twenty-first century rationalist, not a nineteenth century member of the clergy or nobility, desperate to stop the spread of ideas about the power of human reason.
The Masons are not limited to the Anglophone world, and though there were several big names in early American history associated with Freemasonry (among them Washington, and don't pay too much attention to National Treasure), I've found that the association between the Masons and classical liberalism's insistence on separating church and state is clearer in the writings of the Spanish-speaking world. In Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, a priest complaining about the absurdity of a civil war says: "This is silly; the defenders of the faith of Christ destroy the church and the Masons order it rebuilt." The newly independent nations of Latin America often quickly set about secularizing the Church's lands - among them, California's mission system in the 1830s (Saint James Mission, Saint Joseph, Saint Francis - ever heard of those?) The later infamous Santa Anna was one of the chief executors of mission secularization but as soon as he'd had enough of democracy, found that the best move was to jump right back into bed with the Church: "...it is very true that I threw up my cap for liberty with great ardor, and perfect sincerity, but very soon found the folly of it. A hundred years to come my people will not be fit for liberty. They do not know what it is, unenlightened as they are, and under the influence of a Catholic clergy, a despotism is the proper government for them..."
So, you can understand how the large churches and ruling castes of Enlightenment Europe would be so paranoid about the proceedings of these well-educated bourgeoisie, who were re-marking the world but in hindsight were merely acting in accordance with what we now see as basic principles of reason: that the world can be understood, and we can live in it, through reason, rather than the authority of subjectively revealed religious truth.
When the Mason Benjamin Franklin said things like "Lighthouses are more helpful than churches", I can imagine the consternation of the religious establishment. Today, the Masons have become the conservative gentleman's club that my grandfather belonged to, precisely because there is no longer any need to creep around the edges of the religious establishment. If you or I or any reason-minded person were brought back to 1800, we would be good candidates to be Masons or Illuminati based on our modern outlooks. As it turns out, the priests were right to be paranoid, though it did them no good in the long run - because the shadow-dwellers are now the churches.
Cheering on (and Cheating) Your Team
I just checked out the Lesswrong user survey, and was interested in the religious afiliations. It's a rationality blog and only 4 out of 154 respondents described themselves as theists of any kind. Respondents were also asked about their family background - and here is the kicker. I filtered for Lutheran (the religion of my last religious ancestors - my grandparents) and found that there were 4 Lutherans. Hurrah! I shouted, noting that most of the other categories had only 1 or 2. Then I got to the Catholics, and found that they had more. Goddammit. (No comments from the peanut gallery Dan. Now hey. Settle.)
Why should I care that the Catholics beat the Lutherans? Beyond my (I hope) jesting school-colors tribalism that those labels trigger, was I secretly hoping that Lutheranism would be a good branch of religion that somehow post-demise prepares critical minds? If there were such a thing as a one-generation philosophy - one which was inherent nonsense and which through its contradictions was doomed to implosion within several decades, but which would invigorate future generations of critical minds, would it be morally acceptable? Were the Deleuzes and Derridas of the last generation secretly incubating a generation of rigorously critical thinkers? Jacques Derrida's nephew is, after all, a productive materials scientist!
I'll grant you that this particular thought experiment is maybe a little better suited for a science fiction story than a moral debate. But I do frequently think about the morality of an atheist relating to the religion that his or her family emerged from. So here's a better thought experiment, in part because it's one I would've conducted in reality, were it not for lack of materials. I'm starting med school in september. Med school is expensive. Wherever I can get someone else to pay for it, I do. So, being ethnically Lutheran, I looked online for Lutheran scholarships.
Now, I could honestly and without deceit declare in the application for such scholarships that I'm a baptized Lutheran. But - if you believe that religious institutions are on the whole harmful to humans beings (which I do - don't you?), and that the entire concept of G/god(s) is incoherent and therefore meaningless anyway (which I do - don't you?) - how can it be immoral for me to spew three thousand words of steaming B.S. into an essay? The word "God" is contentless. Ask a religious person to define God. But it does get a lot of airtime, so there must be some use, and there is - the word "God" is a noise that humans make when they want to signal membership in the same tribe and adherence to the same authority. So if I write about how much I love God, how I intend to spread His word, and how it's only through Christ that I've achieved success in life, how is that lying? After all, the Lord works in mysterious ways, and faith is an ineffable mystery in everyone's hearts, and only God will know if He is using me for some kind of performance art to test the faith of His children.
Of course, I concede that I would be signalling insincerely: a male peacock's huge tail shows the female that this male must be pretty good if he can still get away from predators, so she wants to reproduce with him, but meanwhile the tail is a clip-on that he leaves in the bushes when he's not cruising the savannah for mates. (Same goes for a pronghorn that can stot higher than all the rest but in actuality can't run worth a damn.) But is deceptive signalling the same as lying? And would the church be right to ask me for the money back once I "come out" to them, only after I carefully check that the deposit has cleared? As my very Austrian and very capitalist grandfather often said (quoting Ben Franklin), God helps those who help themselves - but then (adding his own wisdom) God help those who get caught helping themselves.
Now granted, posting something on the web with my real name announcing my intent to defraud the Lutheran church might be a limiting move in such an enterprise. In fact I wasn't able to find any such scholarships anyway, but you bet your ass I would have applied for any that I found. And written the best essay they'd ever seen. But I can anticipate that my moral reasoning might not be palatable to everyone; and it's useful to examine moral dilemmas that rational consequentialists disagree on, as I have before. So I open the floor to your arguments - would I be wrong to do so?
Why should I care that the Catholics beat the Lutherans? Beyond my (I hope) jesting school-colors tribalism that those labels trigger, was I secretly hoping that Lutheranism would be a good branch of religion that somehow post-demise prepares critical minds? If there were such a thing as a one-generation philosophy - one which was inherent nonsense and which through its contradictions was doomed to implosion within several decades, but which would invigorate future generations of critical minds, would it be morally acceptable? Were the Deleuzes and Derridas of the last generation secretly incubating a generation of rigorously critical thinkers? Jacques Derrida's nephew is, after all, a productive materials scientist!
I'll grant you that this particular thought experiment is maybe a little better suited for a science fiction story than a moral debate. But I do frequently think about the morality of an atheist relating to the religion that his or her family emerged from. So here's a better thought experiment, in part because it's one I would've conducted in reality, were it not for lack of materials. I'm starting med school in september. Med school is expensive. Wherever I can get someone else to pay for it, I do. So, being ethnically Lutheran, I looked online for Lutheran scholarships.
Now, I could honestly and without deceit declare in the application for such scholarships that I'm a baptized Lutheran. But - if you believe that religious institutions are on the whole harmful to humans beings (which I do - don't you?), and that the entire concept of G/god(s) is incoherent and therefore meaningless anyway (which I do - don't you?) - how can it be immoral for me to spew three thousand words of steaming B.S. into an essay? The word "God" is contentless. Ask a religious person to define God. But it does get a lot of airtime, so there must be some use, and there is - the word "God" is a noise that humans make when they want to signal membership in the same tribe and adherence to the same authority. So if I write about how much I love God, how I intend to spread His word, and how it's only through Christ that I've achieved success in life, how is that lying? After all, the Lord works in mysterious ways, and faith is an ineffable mystery in everyone's hearts, and only God will know if He is using me for some kind of performance art to test the faith of His children.
Of course, I concede that I would be signalling insincerely: a male peacock's huge tail shows the female that this male must be pretty good if he can still get away from predators, so she wants to reproduce with him, but meanwhile the tail is a clip-on that he leaves in the bushes when he's not cruising the savannah for mates. (Same goes for a pronghorn that can stot higher than all the rest but in actuality can't run worth a damn.) But is deceptive signalling the same as lying? And would the church be right to ask me for the money back once I "come out" to them, only after I carefully check that the deposit has cleared? As my very Austrian and very capitalist grandfather often said (quoting Ben Franklin), God helps those who help themselves - but then (adding his own wisdom) God help those who get caught helping themselves.
Now granted, posting something on the web with my real name announcing my intent to defraud the Lutheran church might be a limiting move in such an enterprise. In fact I wasn't able to find any such scholarships anyway, but you bet your ass I would have applied for any that I found. And written the best essay they'd ever seen. But I can anticipate that my moral reasoning might not be palatable to everyone; and it's useful to examine moral dilemmas that rational consequentialists disagree on, as I have before. So I open the floor to your arguments - would I be wrong to do so?
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
The (Sort of) Skeptic's Book Club - Good!
The Oprah.com column currently up on the CNN website is about a small group of people who read books and socialize around the theme of exploring faith.
I'll grant you that I had to grit my teeth at the undergirding message of "everyone needs some kind of spirituality" that pervades the piece - can she really be called a skeptic who asks "why quibble about how [the Rocky Mountains] got there"?
But overall I find it incredibly positive that the Oprah brand, which reaches deep into the heart of Middle America, is promoting open inquiry into religion: "We shared a compulsion to question the religious beliefs (or lack thereof) we each grew up with, while looking for personal ways to lead reflective lives." I can sign on to that. I ask people to question their faith all the time, arguing that if it's real, it'll come out stronger, and if not, they'll be closer to the truth.
But most importantly, atheism is a political problem, and this kind of open inquiry is deadly to organized religion - which is the kind that effects elections and develops political ambitions. Even five years ago, can you imagine mainstream news outlets running pieces openly questioning faith? We're making progress.
I'll grant you that I had to grit my teeth at the undergirding message of "everyone needs some kind of spirituality" that pervades the piece - can she really be called a skeptic who asks "why quibble about how [the Rocky Mountains] got there"?
But overall I find it incredibly positive that the Oprah brand, which reaches deep into the heart of Middle America, is promoting open inquiry into religion: "We shared a compulsion to question the religious beliefs (or lack thereof) we each grew up with, while looking for personal ways to lead reflective lives." I can sign on to that. I ask people to question their faith all the time, arguing that if it's real, it'll come out stronger, and if not, they'll be closer to the truth.
But most importantly, atheism is a political problem, and this kind of open inquiry is deadly to organized religion - which is the kind that effects elections and develops political ambitions. Even five years ago, can you imagine mainstream news outlets running pieces openly questioning faith? We're making progress.
Monday, May 11, 2009
I Have Let You Down!
My fellow atheists, I come before you in contrition. Saturday night there were fireworks here, which led to pre-fireworks tailgating with my friend Anup, which led to the consumption of wine, which led to a lowering of my inhibitions and a junk food orgy. So I am imperfect! Shocking, I know.
Because this is an atheist blog and not a diet blog I'm going to refrain from giving you the gory details of the hohos and fruit pies I consumed - (if you want the gory details, feel free to ask). The point is, stay away from Anup when any act of willpower is involved. No, the point is that I've still found promising my community that I'm going to accomplish a certain goal has been very effective in helping me accomplish that goal, and there's nothing supernatural about it.
Because this is an atheist blog and not a diet blog I'm going to refrain from giving you the gory details of the hohos and fruit pies I consumed - (if you want the gory details, feel free to ask). The point is, stay away from Anup when any act of willpower is involved. No, the point is that I've still found promising my community that I'm going to accomplish a certain goal has been very effective in helping me accomplish that goal, and there's nothing supernatural about it.
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Praise the Ford*, It's a Sign...
...a sign from Camp Quest West! I finished a run, immediately jumped in my car, then remembered I wanted to check something and jumped back out. On returning to the car, on my car seat was this unmistakeable likeness of the Camp Quest West logo:
Staring at it amidst the redwoods where I was parked, I was struck by the certainty that this must be a sign. Never mind that I happened to have been running in a Camp Quest T-shirt, I was sweaty, and the logo might have altered the permeability of the shirt material - this could only be a communication directly from the Great Spirit!
Yes, the Great Spirit of Camp Quest West - the secular summer camp for kids. It's beyond belief!
*In reality I drive a Jeep.
Staring at it amidst the redwoods where I was parked, I was struck by the certainty that this must be a sign. Never mind that I happened to have been running in a Camp Quest T-shirt, I was sweaty, and the logo might have altered the permeability of the shirt material - this could only be a communication directly from the Great Spirit!
Yes, the Great Spirit of Camp Quest West - the secular summer camp for kids. It's beyond belief!
*In reality I drive a Jeep.
Monday, May 4, 2009
Closeted Atheists: WE NEED YOU
Go here for a moving story of an atheist finally coming out to her family.
No doubt some of my readers are in the same position that Everythingelseatheist was until the last forty-eight hours. It's scary, but look - she survived. It seemed like it wasn't even as bad as she anticipated. And she got an immediate outpouring of support. She, and you, are incredibly important to keeping rationalism's momentum going. You have the energy of the born-again, no pun intended, and you have links back to the old world - you know what's important to people and can speak their language. When you come out, there won't be time to worry about occasional harsh words from friends and family, because you'll have a mission, to help others make the same transition. You have the opportunity of a lifetime, and we need you.
To my fellow atheists from nonreligious/mildly religious families - our new sisters and brothers in rationalism deserve and need our support. When people come out we have to be there for them, and we have to remember how important they are!
Coming from an atheist household, I might not be the guy to talk to about how to handle coming-out encounters with religious family members. Still, it seems to me that it's worth pointing out to your (possibly distraught) relatives that none of us chooses our beliefs. You don't have free will about them. You don't wake up and decide that you believe capitalism is good (or bad), or that the noise your car is making is your transmission; you're automatically forced to those conclusions by evidence, and/or by processes that often (usually?) don't take place in your conscious brain. It's handed to you at the end of a long effort of number crunching - especially something as important as this. Because religious people are fond of revelation, this should at least temporarily placate them. If their belief came to them in a flash, it wasn't something they decided, either - and neither was your own "depiphany".
No doubt some of my readers are in the same position that Everythingelseatheist was until the last forty-eight hours. It's scary, but look - she survived. It seemed like it wasn't even as bad as she anticipated. And she got an immediate outpouring of support. She, and you, are incredibly important to keeping rationalism's momentum going. You have the energy of the born-again, no pun intended, and you have links back to the old world - you know what's important to people and can speak their language. When you come out, there won't be time to worry about occasional harsh words from friends and family, because you'll have a mission, to help others make the same transition. You have the opportunity of a lifetime, and we need you.
To my fellow atheists from nonreligious/mildly religious families - our new sisters and brothers in rationalism deserve and need our support. When people come out we have to be there for them, and we have to remember how important they are!
Coming from an atheist household, I might not be the guy to talk to about how to handle coming-out encounters with religious family members. Still, it seems to me that it's worth pointing out to your (possibly distraught) relatives that none of us chooses our beliefs. You don't have free will about them. You don't wake up and decide that you believe capitalism is good (or bad), or that the noise your car is making is your transmission; you're automatically forced to those conclusions by evidence, and/or by processes that often (usually?) don't take place in your conscious brain. It's handed to you at the end of a long effort of number crunching - especially something as important as this. Because religious people are fond of revelation, this should at least temporarily placate them. If their belief came to them in a flash, it wasn't something they decided, either - and neither was your own "depiphany".
Which Deadly Sin Does *Your* State Excel In
Check out a hilarious map of the occurrence of the Seven Deadly Sins in the US, using real crime and other demographic data, courtesy Kansas State U. The article writer at the Vegas Sun refers to it as "a precision party trick — rigorous mapping of ridiculous data."
What's interesting is the indirect data that the map-makers chose, or were forced to choose, to make their map. For example, how do you get data on lust? In their case, they used STD rates. Does that really correlate with lust? (Singles, this may diminish your urge to buy a plane ticket straight to the middle of one of those red zones). That they had to choose such indirect measures raises other interesting questions - if we don't bother to measure all the Sins directly (like lust), can they really be that much of a problem?
What's interesting is the indirect data that the map-makers chose, or were forced to choose, to make their map. For example, how do you get data on lust? In their case, they used STD rates. Does that really correlate with lust? (Singles, this may diminish your urge to buy a plane ticket straight to the middle of one of those red zones). That they had to choose such indirect measures raises other interesting questions - if we don't bother to measure all the Sins directly (like lust), can they really be that much of a problem?
Atheist Community Gives Us Strength
Saturday at midnight, it had been one month and a few hours since last I tasted that eternal weakness of mine, chocolate - which I had given up in a kind of atheist Yomkip-lent-madan. I have tried to give up chocolate before, and never succeeded for more than 72 hours.
Why did it work this time? Because I dedicated it to the atheist community, and knew that if I faltered I would give ammunition to people who say you can't overcome weaknesses without religion. I honestly wasn't even tempted that much, and faltering but then lying to my community was never an option. It's like saying you summited a mountain solo when you didn't. If you're an honest person, you don't seriously think about it.
So I encourage you: got a bad habit you want to break? Post it in public in a (secular) community that's important to you. You'll be amazed at how easy it is! The power of community was the most important lesson for me - even a virtual community. Atheists tend to be individualists and nonconformists, and that's fine, but it's certainly no reason not to take advantage of the social nature of the human animal.
In celebration yesterday while my wife and I drove up to Mendocino, I ate 1 Snickers (the double kind) 1 Milky Way (also double) 1 Hershey bar, 3 choco-pies, and a chocolate yogurt. Amazing I had time to drive! Why the choco-orgy? Because starting today, for you, fellow atheists, I'm giving it up for another month - and adding junk food on top of it, another Achilles taste bud of mine. You know, Hohos, Doritos, and those little fruit pies you get at convenience stores.
I will report back June 5. Now if only I can overcome my wife's attempts to trick me.
Why did it work this time? Because I dedicated it to the atheist community, and knew that if I faltered I would give ammunition to people who say you can't overcome weaknesses without religion. I honestly wasn't even tempted that much, and faltering but then lying to my community was never an option. It's like saying you summited a mountain solo when you didn't. If you're an honest person, you don't seriously think about it.
So I encourage you: got a bad habit you want to break? Post it in public in a (secular) community that's important to you. You'll be amazed at how easy it is! The power of community was the most important lesson for me - even a virtual community. Atheists tend to be individualists and nonconformists, and that's fine, but it's certainly no reason not to take advantage of the social nature of the human animal.
In celebration yesterday while my wife and I drove up to Mendocino, I ate 1 Snickers (the double kind) 1 Milky Way (also double) 1 Hershey bar, 3 choco-pies, and a chocolate yogurt. Amazing I had time to drive! Why the choco-orgy? Because starting today, for you, fellow atheists, I'm giving it up for another month - and adding junk food on top of it, another Achilles taste bud of mine. You know, Hohos, Doritos, and those little fruit pies you get at convenience stores.
I will report back June 5. Now if only I can overcome my wife's attempts to trick me.
Saturday, May 2, 2009
Materialist Transcendence
Sam Harris writes at length in the End of Faith about how modern materialism is confused by centuries of religious co-opting of the language of transcendence. Whenever someone starts talking about "being part of something bigger than yourself",
meditation, expanding consciousness, or a sense of peace or oneness, we get out our woo-meters. The problem is that these things, or at least an experience of them whether or not you think they're "real", are an aspect of human neurology and an important part of our lives. We can't afford not to reclaim them from religion.
Sometimes when I participated in discussions of what atheists can offer people in this realm, I used to feel that we were at a disadvantage. Because theists are not bound by truth and can gorge on whatever cognitive McDonald's and meth that their religion doesn't explicitly proscribe, I worried that what we offered would always be destined to be transcendence-Nutrasweet to their refined sugar. This concern is put perhaps less pejoratively in a New York Times op-ed about non-religious people becoming religious.
Eventually I realized that this was really an incredible advantage. These feelings of transcendence are often associated with events - social gatherings and life-changing events - and there's nothing stopping us from doing the same thing, for the simple reason that they fulfill us and they feel good. In other words, for us, they're real, and they're unpolluted by meaningless or half-understood liturgies obscuring their meaning. And there's no debate about whether we're having these events; even a devout Mormon or Muslim won't try to tell you that you haven't really had a wedding or kids, because right there's the video of the wedding, and right there are your kids. They might try to insist that you haven't had the same joy that L. Ron Hubbard or Jesus gives them - that's fine, let them.
So what are these transcendence-inspiring events (both good and bad)? Feel free to comment with your own. For me they've been:
- Realizing about age 12 that one day I'd be "on my own"
- Learning about the origins of man and the universe
- Losing my virginity
- Falling in love
- Deaths of father, grandparents, friends
- The few times I've been able to meditate successfully
- Proposing to my wife
- Getting married
- Birth of my children (hasn't happened yet but I expect!)
- Experiencing great novels, paintings, or films
- Learning a new idea that forces me to re-evaluate how I think about something
- Being alone and self-dependent for extended periods in a harsh environment (deserts, mountains, the Arctic)
- Highly physical goal-oriented activity (i.e. climbing a mountain peak and standing at the summit, and watching the mountain's shadow on the clouds below like the photo I took for the banner picture on this blog)
- Visiting historical places (standing where an atomic bomb went off or seeing Jefferson's home)
- Physical exertion (that runner's high after a long run)
About a year and a half ago, I remember finishing a run with my Wednesday night running group. It was a hilly one, on a classic Northern California September evening - warm, no humidity, golden-grass hills studded with oaks - and after we finished, we got our canvas folding chairs out of our cars and sat nursing our post-run beers. As we talked and told stories and playfully insulted each other, the sky went from dark blue to orange to purple. And I thought to myself: why does there need to be more than this? Why would I want there to be?
meditation, expanding consciousness, or a sense of peace or oneness, we get out our woo-meters. The problem is that these things, or at least an experience of them whether or not you think they're "real", are an aspect of human neurology and an important part of our lives. We can't afford not to reclaim them from religion.
Sometimes when I participated in discussions of what atheists can offer people in this realm, I used to feel that we were at a disadvantage. Because theists are not bound by truth and can gorge on whatever cognitive McDonald's and meth that their religion doesn't explicitly proscribe, I worried that what we offered would always be destined to be transcendence-Nutrasweet to their refined sugar. This concern is put perhaps less pejoratively in a New York Times op-ed about non-religious people becoming religious.
Eventually I realized that this was really an incredible advantage. These feelings of transcendence are often associated with events - social gatherings and life-changing events - and there's nothing stopping us from doing the same thing, for the simple reason that they fulfill us and they feel good. In other words, for us, they're real, and they're unpolluted by meaningless or half-understood liturgies obscuring their meaning. And there's no debate about whether we're having these events; even a devout Mormon or Muslim won't try to tell you that you haven't really had a wedding or kids, because right there's the video of the wedding, and right there are your kids. They might try to insist that you haven't had the same joy that L. Ron Hubbard or Jesus gives them - that's fine, let them.
So what are these transcendence-inspiring events (both good and bad)? Feel free to comment with your own. For me they've been:
- Realizing about age 12 that one day I'd be "on my own"
- Learning about the origins of man and the universe
- Losing my virginity
- Falling in love
- Deaths of father, grandparents, friends
- The few times I've been able to meditate successfully
- Proposing to my wife
- Getting married
- Birth of my children (hasn't happened yet but I expect!)
- Experiencing great novels, paintings, or films
- Learning a new idea that forces me to re-evaluate how I think about something
- Being alone and self-dependent for extended periods in a harsh environment (deserts, mountains, the Arctic)
- Highly physical goal-oriented activity (i.e. climbing a mountain peak and standing at the summit, and watching the mountain's shadow on the clouds below like the photo I took for the banner picture on this blog)
- Visiting historical places (standing where an atomic bomb went off or seeing Jefferson's home)
- Physical exertion (that runner's high after a long run)
About a year and a half ago, I remember finishing a run with my Wednesday night running group. It was a hilly one, on a classic Northern California September evening - warm, no humidity, golden-grass hills studded with oaks - and after we finished, we got our canvas folding chairs out of our cars and sat nursing our post-run beers. As we talked and told stories and playfully insulted each other, the sky went from dark blue to orange to purple. And I thought to myself: why does there need to be more than this? Why would I want there to be?
Friday, May 1, 2009
Skyhooks and Suffering
On Machines Like Us, there's a post about the last four skyhooks: the last four questions that are so huge and mysterious and difficult that they are seemingly in need, to many otherwise honest and well-educated people in the twenty-first century, of supernatural explanations. Those questions are the origin of the universe, the origin of life, the origin of consciousness, and our capacity for morality.
I disagree that these are the only four significant skyhooks. They're certainly interesting, and I spend more time than is good for me wondering about them, but there are others that are not asked nearly enough. For the aforementioned four, I can easily imagine them being answered without a huge impact on our lives. Let's say the answers are: a gravimetric quark fluctation, RNA seeded by comets, panpsychist fifth basic property of the universe, evolved as survival heuristic. Done. Neat, but so what?
A skyhook with the potential to make a much bigger impact is the one engendered by questions about the existence of suffering, how to eliminate it, and how we can all agree to live together. In despair or hope people seek skyhooks from silent skies and shrines. It's these most important questions that magical and religious thinking has most clouded for thousands of years and on which we atheists must make our mark.
I disagree that these are the only four significant skyhooks. They're certainly interesting, and I spend more time than is good for me wondering about them, but there are others that are not asked nearly enough. For the aforementioned four, I can easily imagine them being answered without a huge impact on our lives. Let's say the answers are: a gravimetric quark fluctation, RNA seeded by comets, panpsychist fifth basic property of the universe, evolved as survival heuristic. Done. Neat, but so what?
A skyhook with the potential to make a much bigger impact is the one engendered by questions about the existence of suffering, how to eliminate it, and how we can all agree to live together. In despair or hope people seek skyhooks from silent skies and shrines. It's these most important questions that magical and religious thinking has most clouded for thousands of years and on which we atheists must make our mark.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Buddhism for Atheists
There's a post at Unreasonable Faith about Buddhism, and specifically how a Western ex-Catholic tried it and lapsed from it, unimpressed. I had my own dalliance with Buddhism in (of course) college, and I've sometimes said that if an alien landed, pointed a ray gun at me, and said "Earth is now a zoo, and you have to pick one of these world religions to be the one we allow to fluorish," I would pick Buddhism as the least bad. I still might, in that situation. Some people claim that Buddhism is a form of atheism, that Buddha is not a god but a very talented nice guy who will help everyone achieve enlightenment and escape reality and reincarnation. But every religion claims at some point that it's not a religion, and I don't know any atheists who believe in supernatural entities or get their beliefs from scriptures and political structures. Buddhism is a religion, and it's not atheist.
Westerners have a bit of an attachment to Buddhism (ha ha) because it seems profound, unoppressive, and lacking in the political ambitions that we associate with organized religion in the West. Then again, somebody once told me rather darkly that you can like a person only until you know them well enough to discover their flaws. In the same vein, once you start learning about Buddhism, you start seeing its historical warts.
When I would mention my glowing opinion of Buddhism to my wife, who is from Japan, she would warn me that perhaps its history was not actually that rosy. To take the case of Japan then: Kammu was an eighth century emperor who was kind of like their Augustus, King Arthur and Carlos V all rolled into one, and he was in power only a couple centuries after Buddhism arrived. Kammu actually moved the capital to Kyoto because the Buddhists (centered in Nara) were getting their fingers into the government. Starting around the twelfth century, Buddhist priests there engineered a caste of untouchables to work with beef and leather, because people needed it, but killing animals was a sin and the work of unclean minds - so, you create a workaround, and in so doing condemn part of the population and their descendants to moral degradation. Only today are these people reintegrating into Japanese society, and in some places where they are still gathered in single rural towns, the town is not even put on the map. A Buddhist order of guerilla warriors even developed (the yamabushi, the hiders-in-the-mountains).
More recently, Buddhist involvement in promoting the Second World War was striking - you can read about this in Christopher Hitchens' God is Not Great, How Religion Poisons Everything. I found that passage simultaneously disillusioning and enlightening. It's been a long time since I felt that disappointment which comes when you're factually disabused of a long-held notion, and for this I thank Msr. Hitchens. Last but not least among these injustices, the big Zen temple in Kyoto was going to charge me twenty bucks just to look inside. That's the greatest tragedy of all!
Thoughts for another post: Japanese Buddhists think nothing of visiting a Shinto shrine. How many Christians go to synagogue at Yom Kippur? There are other instances in Asia of tolerance of religion up to and including crossover between followers of established religion (like the otherwise brutal Mongols not giving a damn what religion their subjects were; like Buddhists operating some Hindu temples in Nepal). These examples go so far beyond mere unconscious syncretism, like Christians having Christmas trees, that it is difficult for Westerners to understand ("how can you be Shingon Buddhist! You're at a Shinto shrine!" "But we always toast oranges here every year at this time.") Why this allowance for multiple religious institutions for single individuals? Is the exclusivity meme an Abrahamic one?
Westerners have a bit of an attachment to Buddhism (ha ha) because it seems profound, unoppressive, and lacking in the political ambitions that we associate with organized religion in the West. Then again, somebody once told me rather darkly that you can like a person only until you know them well enough to discover their flaws. In the same vein, once you start learning about Buddhism, you start seeing its historical warts.
When I would mention my glowing opinion of Buddhism to my wife, who is from Japan, she would warn me that perhaps its history was not actually that rosy. To take the case of Japan then: Kammu was an eighth century emperor who was kind of like their Augustus, King Arthur and Carlos V all rolled into one, and he was in power only a couple centuries after Buddhism arrived. Kammu actually moved the capital to Kyoto because the Buddhists (centered in Nara) were getting their fingers into the government. Starting around the twelfth century, Buddhist priests there engineered a caste of untouchables to work with beef and leather, because people needed it, but killing animals was a sin and the work of unclean minds - so, you create a workaround, and in so doing condemn part of the population and their descendants to moral degradation. Only today are these people reintegrating into Japanese society, and in some places where they are still gathered in single rural towns, the town is not even put on the map. A Buddhist order of guerilla warriors even developed (the yamabushi, the hiders-in-the-mountains).
More recently, Buddhist involvement in promoting the Second World War was striking - you can read about this in Christopher Hitchens' God is Not Great, How Religion Poisons Everything. I found that passage simultaneously disillusioning and enlightening. It's been a long time since I felt that disappointment which comes when you're factually disabused of a long-held notion, and for this I thank Msr. Hitchens. Last but not least among these injustices, the big Zen temple in Kyoto was going to charge me twenty bucks just to look inside. That's the greatest tragedy of all!
Thoughts for another post: Japanese Buddhists think nothing of visiting a Shinto shrine. How many Christians go to synagogue at Yom Kippur? There are other instances in Asia of tolerance of religion up to and including crossover between followers of established religion (like the otherwise brutal Mongols not giving a damn what religion their subjects were; like Buddhists operating some Hindu temples in Nepal). These examples go so far beyond mere unconscious syncretism, like Christians having Christmas trees, that it is difficult for Westerners to understand ("how can you be Shingon Buddhist! You're at a Shinto shrine!" "But we always toast oranges here every year at this time.") Why this allowance for multiple religious institutions for single individuals? Is the exclusivity meme an Abrahamic one?
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Thought Experiment: Irrational Moral Catalysts
My position on religion has increasingly become that religion is just another irrational belief - which everybody who has ever lived has had plenty of. Of course, the world would be an overall better place if these were gone, but as long as people keep their neuroses to themselves, you don't have the right to demand they give them up. My wife is terrified of butterflies - it's true - but she doesn't care if other people like butterflies. The second she starts demanding the extermination of butterflies, forms an anti-butterfly political party, or starts making demands of her otherwise sympathetic (not to mention handsome, brilliant and humble) husband, that's when it becomes my business.
Of course you see the parallel, although in all honesty, much of modern religion in the industrialized world (particularly in Western Europe) is little more than a constellation of ceremonies that equate to a signal of community membership; it's Religion Lite(tm). And who cares. These people are Lutheran or Catholic in the same sense that someone is an Eagles fan or a Pennsylvania Dutchman. They do some odd things on the weekends but it's not your job to correct them, because so do you. If they leave you alone, you leave them alone.
Of course, religion doesn't leave you alone. In fact, it has three characteristics setting it apart from other neuroses or superstitions or heuristics that justify a special term like "religion" within the realm of irrationality: it has a name that's known by the afflicted and the unafflicted alike, its adherents consciously resist being disabused of the beleifs, and it relies on reinforcement by groupthink. I further believe that there is enough of a difference between organized, evangelical, politically aggressive religion on one hand (Islam, Christianity), and casual or tribal religion on the other (shamanism, wicca) that the two should have entirely different names. It's the difference between a skateboard and a tractor trailer.
I've posted a little thought experiment before about the morality of using religion as a moral motivator if it happens to be untrue. If I send you on a business trip to, say, Afghanistan, and tell you that we have behind-the-scenes security, political influence and cash, you would behave a little more boldly. Does it affect the morality of my actions if I lied to you about our infrastructure on the ground? Of course it does!
People often say that their faith sometimes spurs them on to acts of morality, and I'm inclined to believe them, at least occasionally. I think these people would have been good people regardless of religious upbringing, and their faith seems to be a direct catalyst in some cases. Many atheists/skeptics/rationalists/etc. would still have a problem with acts inspired by superstitions, even if the result was moral. Then again, we all of us are irrational in some ways. So what about a moral act inspired by non-religious irrational beliefs?
How about this: say I'm thinking about volunteering for the Special Olympics. I'm on the fence about it. But I start to believe that if I do volunteer, then an extremely attractive female acquaintance of mine will be instantly driven into my arms by my act of altruism. Never mind that I have a face like a catcher's mitt, and this friend of mine wouldn't think of me in said context even with enough sodium pentathol to knock out a rhino. (Never mind also that I'm married for the duration of this thought experiment. Unless you're an attractive 5'7" or taller female atheist with dark hair and a trust fund, then you can keep never minding indefinitely.) In this case, I end up volunteering. Is my irrational act more or less moral than if I did so because I believe Jesus wanted me to? What about if I did it because it makes me feel good to help the Special Olympics (presumably the rational choice, at least to a non-Kantian). Is there a difference?
I hope there are strong opinions on this question; please share them.
Of course you see the parallel, although in all honesty, much of modern religion in the industrialized world (particularly in Western Europe) is little more than a constellation of ceremonies that equate to a signal of community membership; it's Religion Lite(tm). And who cares. These people are Lutheran or Catholic in the same sense that someone is an Eagles fan or a Pennsylvania Dutchman. They do some odd things on the weekends but it's not your job to correct them, because so do you. If they leave you alone, you leave them alone.
Of course, religion doesn't leave you alone. In fact, it has three characteristics setting it apart from other neuroses or superstitions or heuristics that justify a special term like "religion" within the realm of irrationality: it has a name that's known by the afflicted and the unafflicted alike, its adherents consciously resist being disabused of the beleifs, and it relies on reinforcement by groupthink. I further believe that there is enough of a difference between organized, evangelical, politically aggressive religion on one hand (Islam, Christianity), and casual or tribal religion on the other (shamanism, wicca) that the two should have entirely different names. It's the difference between a skateboard and a tractor trailer.
I've posted a little thought experiment before about the morality of using religion as a moral motivator if it happens to be untrue. If I send you on a business trip to, say, Afghanistan, and tell you that we have behind-the-scenes security, political influence and cash, you would behave a little more boldly. Does it affect the morality of my actions if I lied to you about our infrastructure on the ground? Of course it does!
People often say that their faith sometimes spurs them on to acts of morality, and I'm inclined to believe them, at least occasionally. I think these people would have been good people regardless of religious upbringing, and their faith seems to be a direct catalyst in some cases. Many atheists/skeptics/rationalists/etc. would still have a problem with acts inspired by superstitions, even if the result was moral. Then again, we all of us are irrational in some ways. So what about a moral act inspired by non-religious irrational beliefs?
How about this: say I'm thinking about volunteering for the Special Olympics. I'm on the fence about it. But I start to believe that if I do volunteer, then an extremely attractive female acquaintance of mine will be instantly driven into my arms by my act of altruism. Never mind that I have a face like a catcher's mitt, and this friend of mine wouldn't think of me in said context even with enough sodium pentathol to knock out a rhino. (Never mind also that I'm married for the duration of this thought experiment. Unless you're an attractive 5'7" or taller female atheist with dark hair and a trust fund, then you can keep never minding indefinitely.) In this case, I end up volunteering. Is my irrational act more or less moral than if I did so because I believe Jesus wanted me to? What about if I did it because it makes me feel good to help the Special Olympics (presumably the rational choice, at least to a non-Kantian). Is there a difference?
I hope there are strong opinions on this question; please share them.
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Data on De-deversion
I often lament the relative lack of facts about religion, at least regarding people's attitudes and actions. That's why I was happy to see that over at The Friendly Atheist, Hemant posted some data from a recent Pew Forum study on why people leave religions.
Of particular interest also is the graphic on why nonreligious people return to faith:
Not only is this food for thought for us atheists, but I think many theists will be happy to talk about these surveys if you make a point of showing that you're not just waiting to pounce on an inconsistency in their statements, but to discuss the facts of people in their faith and why people leave and re-join. You might not agree, but these meta-facts are good ways to start conversations and show them that atheism and atheists aren't so bad.
Of particular interest also is the graphic on why nonreligious people return to faith:
Not only is this food for thought for us atheists, but I think many theists will be happy to talk about these surveys if you make a point of showing that you're not just waiting to pounce on an inconsistency in their statements, but to discuss the facts of people in their faith and why people leave and re-join. You might not agree, but these meta-facts are good ways to start conversations and show them that atheism and atheists aren't so bad.
NCSE and NOMA
NCSE and NOMA
This is a modified version of a comment I left on Pharyngula, to this post:
I'm no doubt echoing a viewpoint that has been expressed at this and similar posts before, but I'm just fine with the NCSE publicly saying that science and religion are compatible NOMA blah blah blah, and the movement at large simultaneously continuing the assault from PZ, Coyne, Harris, etc. Both approaches are making progress. You don't win political games by converting people to a new philosophy. That's why political organizations that don't have directly to do with religion - like the NCSE - are, quite appropriately, not directly making religion an issue. If muddying the waters to make it look like we aren't eroding the role of religion in public life is a way of appearing less threatening to the average voter, so much the better.
To take a more openly militant line would make NCSE much less effective than they have been. So if the Reverend Barry Lynn is an effective leader of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, then I don't care if he's an atheist, and I don't care if they mouth some pleasing platitudes when they're defending the Constitution, and why should you?
Let's not be like the GOP and become exclusionary by insisting that all our organizations' public faces are scrubbed in an ideological clean room, and let's not fall prey to the notorious atheist tendency to be splitters, and harder to keep together than herded cats. If someone is getting results, that's what matters.
This is a modified version of a comment I left on Pharyngula, to this post:
I'm no doubt echoing a viewpoint that has been expressed at this and similar posts before, but I'm just fine with the NCSE publicly saying that science and religion are compatible NOMA blah blah blah, and the movement at large simultaneously continuing the assault from PZ, Coyne, Harris, etc. Both approaches are making progress. You don't win political games by converting people to a new philosophy. That's why political organizations that don't have directly to do with religion - like the NCSE - are, quite appropriately, not directly making religion an issue. If muddying the waters to make it look like we aren't eroding the role of religion in public life is a way of appearing less threatening to the average voter, so much the better.
To take a more openly militant line would make NCSE much less effective than they have been. So if the Reverend Barry Lynn is an effective leader of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, then I don't care if he's an atheist, and I don't care if they mouth some pleasing platitudes when they're defending the Constitution, and why should you?
Let's not be like the GOP and become exclusionary by insisting that all our organizations' public faces are scrubbed in an ideological clean room, and let's not fall prey to the notorious atheist tendency to be splitters, and harder to keep together than herded cats. If someone is getting results, that's what matters.
A Fun Video Game
I debated whether I should put this on here because it is, shall we say, not constructive, but it's too ridiculous not to bring to your attention. Enjoy.
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Ex-Christians: How Did You Figure Out Santa Was B.S.?
I was just talking about this with someone today. I'm sad to report that I'm probably at the late end of the distribution and didn't even figure it out on my own. At age 9 on the school bus the day after Easter, a kid in the next grade told me I was stupid for believing in the Easter bunny and that it was just my parents. When I got home I hesitantly asked my mom if she and my dad were really the Easter bunny, and when she admitted yes, at least I made the connection and asked if they were Santa and the tooth fairy too.
I was raised atheist, since both my parents are, but we're "ethnic Lutherans" as I often say, so we kept the tradition. I'm debating whether I'll do that for my own kids; I'm trying not to be influenced by a desire to live vicariously through them and have them redeem my own poor performance by figuring it out earlier than I did.
But for the ex-Christians and ethnic Christians out there, when did you figure it out? How? For people from other religions - did your parents tell you to play along and not say Santa was fake or that the Christian parents would get mad? Did you ever wonder that your Christian friends at school were delusional when they talked about flying fat people breaking into their houses through the chimney?
I was raised atheist, since both my parents are, but we're "ethnic Lutherans" as I often say, so we kept the tradition. I'm debating whether I'll do that for my own kids; I'm trying not to be influenced by a desire to live vicariously through them and have them redeem my own poor performance by figuring it out earlier than I did.
But for the ex-Christians and ethnic Christians out there, when did you figure it out? How? For people from other religions - did your parents tell you to play along and not say Santa was fake or that the Christian parents would get mad? Did you ever wonder that your Christian friends at school were delusional when they talked about flying fat people breaking into their houses through the chimney?
Elevator Pitches and Treppenwitz
I went to my first Bay Area Skeptics meeting last night, and not surprisingly had a great time. I even met the guy whose fault it was, by effective promotion, that I didn't get to see Michael Shermer at Ohlone College (I didn't buy a ticket in advance and it was sold out) - but I got to see Shermer at the California Academy of Science this past Thursday so it worked out.
Among the conversation topics last night was treppenwitz - you know when you suddenly think of a great a comeback, an hour after the argument? In German that's called treppenwitz, literally "staircase wit" (as you're walking away from the argument). For example (and don't worry, I'm not digressing into politics) I was put on the spot for a quick definition of my own political philosophy, libertarianism - a request that is wholly appropriate at a gathering of skeptics, and one that I was told was also made to fellow libertarian Michael Shermer at dinner on Thursday night. I reflected in that moment that a) one's political philosophy not easily boiling down to a bumper sticker is not necessarily an indictment of that philosophy but that b) you should have your "elevator pitch" ready, you can at least say something usefully in the spirit of the philosophy without distorting it. This leaves your audience with the impression that you and your philosophy have your stuff together.
Later in the evening of course I'd boiled it down but by then everyone had gone their separate ways (though I was in my car when I came upon the best way to summarize it, not the staircase). I've been brought up similarly short in the past by people demanding the same for atheism's contribution to morality, and there was a particularly egregious case of treppenwitz because a couple years after the discussion I blogged that not living your life according to a Bronze Age Powerpoint slide isn't necessarily a bad thing. But this is exactly why you need to think of an elevator pitch for why atheism/skepticism/humanism is a better way to live your life, individually, than religious faith.
As fate would have it, I had a second opportunity the same evening when I cashed out at the bar and told the bartender that I had been there with the skeptics. He brought out the old canard that skeptics were just being close-minded in a different way, and what I said to him, perhaps less eloquently than it's distilled here, was: unless you believe in everything, which nobody does, you need a way to decide which things to believe and which not to. Skepticism is about being clear and honest with yourself and others on what your rules are for doing that.
Among the conversation topics last night was treppenwitz - you know when you suddenly think of a great a comeback, an hour after the argument? In German that's called treppenwitz, literally "staircase wit" (as you're walking away from the argument). For example (and don't worry, I'm not digressing into politics) I was put on the spot for a quick definition of my own political philosophy, libertarianism - a request that is wholly appropriate at a gathering of skeptics, and one that I was told was also made to fellow libertarian Michael Shermer at dinner on Thursday night. I reflected in that moment that a) one's political philosophy not easily boiling down to a bumper sticker is not necessarily an indictment of that philosophy but that b) you should have your "elevator pitch" ready, you can at least say something usefully in the spirit of the philosophy without distorting it. This leaves your audience with the impression that you and your philosophy have your stuff together.
Later in the evening of course I'd boiled it down but by then everyone had gone their separate ways (though I was in my car when I came upon the best way to summarize it, not the staircase). I've been brought up similarly short in the past by people demanding the same for atheism's contribution to morality, and there was a particularly egregious case of treppenwitz because a couple years after the discussion I blogged that not living your life according to a Bronze Age Powerpoint slide isn't necessarily a bad thing. But this is exactly why you need to think of an elevator pitch for why atheism/skepticism/humanism is a better way to live your life, individually, than religious faith.
As fate would have it, I had a second opportunity the same evening when I cashed out at the bar and told the bartender that I had been there with the skeptics. He brought out the old canard that skeptics were just being close-minded in a different way, and what I said to him, perhaps less eloquently than it's distilled here, was: unless you believe in everything, which nobody does, you need a way to decide which things to believe and which not to. Skepticism is about being clear and honest with yourself and others on what your rules are for doing that.
Thought Experiment: The Fake Safety Net
The two most commonly encountered arguments for religion - that is, the ones you'll get at cocktail parties or on the bus - are 1) that it's true, and 2) that's it's good for you. These are typically unclear in the minds of theists, and they are usually conflated. Tell me how many discussions you've had like this one: Religious person says religion A is true (#1 above). You ask them why they disbelieve in religions B and C, point out the inconsistencies in their own religion, and their inconsistencies in how they determine what things are true. Then the religious person swtiches to some variant of #2 above, "But what about all the good religion A does" or "people would have no morality without religion A". And they often give examples of real religious people who led lives which you would probably agree were productive and amazing, and made the world a better place; proof positive that religion is good, right?
As for this change in rhetorical tack, I don't think religious people do it consciously; in general when some proposition we hold dear is under attack, we slide around without realizing it to preserve it by discussing it from another angle. But the problem is that not only are there two completely separate questions here (is it true, and does it make people do good things), but by most reckonings of morality, including religious ones, the second is pointless to discuss before the first is established.
Thought experiments are useful because they can put the familiar in an unfamiliar context, and allow us to think more critically about it. For example: I'm starting med school in the fall. Let's say that as summer 2010 approaches, someone comes to the school and gives a presentation to recruit us to go to a developing country with a horrible infrastructure and an oppressive government, and have us do the preliminary work to set up NGO-based mental health clinics. Part of the benefit to us of volunteering with them, they explain, is that the group is financed by a super-wealthy philanthropist who not only has piles of money, but massive political and diplomatic pull in the country in question in order to clear the way for us and keep us out of trouble if the local thugs ever give us a problem. What do you think I would say? Damn right I would join that group and get on the plane and get right over there.
As you might predict, with a safety net like that, I would be more aggressive and fearless in my mission than your average NGO person might be working in the same environment. Fortunately in the course of establishing the clinic, we end up never having to call on the string-pulling services of our mysterious benefactor; that said, during the summer there are still a couple close scrapes with this police state's thugs which we brush off rudely, assuming they were already taken care of in advance, because the local government knows we (and our patients and employees) are de facto untouchable. At the end of the summer we fly back and present our accomplishments to the med school.
The representative of the mysterious benefactor applauds our work and says "Bravo, and I'm glad you're back in one piece. Because that whole diplomatic and political
backing bit was just a smoke screen to make you feel safe and therefore motivated to be more effective in your mission."
Would I be really angry, and justified in feeling that way? Absolutely. Of course, I also easily concede that by believing in this false safety net, we might have accomplished more. Does that justify this yahoo having lied to us - and justify that we consequently put our employees and patients in danger, since they've been nonchalantly telling the secret police to go f*** themselves every time they show up looking for bribes?
Of course, the clearest parallel here is to missionary work (and interestingly, missionaries are indeed sometimes the target of violence even though they're spreading the Word into new realms supposedly under the protection of their deity.)
The exact same moral argument applies to religious claims to moral motivation in general. If it's immoral to lie to someone about false comforts to inspire them to greater deeds, then there's no point in the discussion moving on to "look at all the good it does" until the first question - whether it's true - has been abundantly established. It has not.
As for this change in rhetorical tack, I don't think religious people do it consciously; in general when some proposition we hold dear is under attack, we slide around without realizing it to preserve it by discussing it from another angle. But the problem is that not only are there two completely separate questions here (is it true, and does it make people do good things), but by most reckonings of morality, including religious ones, the second is pointless to discuss before the first is established.
Thought experiments are useful because they can put the familiar in an unfamiliar context, and allow us to think more critically about it. For example: I'm starting med school in the fall. Let's say that as summer 2010 approaches, someone comes to the school and gives a presentation to recruit us to go to a developing country with a horrible infrastructure and an oppressive government, and have us do the preliminary work to set up NGO-based mental health clinics. Part of the benefit to us of volunteering with them, they explain, is that the group is financed by a super-wealthy philanthropist who not only has piles of money, but massive political and diplomatic pull in the country in question in order to clear the way for us and keep us out of trouble if the local thugs ever give us a problem. What do you think I would say? Damn right I would join that group and get on the plane and get right over there.
As you might predict, with a safety net like that, I would be more aggressive and fearless in my mission than your average NGO person might be working in the same environment. Fortunately in the course of establishing the clinic, we end up never having to call on the string-pulling services of our mysterious benefactor; that said, during the summer there are still a couple close scrapes with this police state's thugs which we brush off rudely, assuming they were already taken care of in advance, because the local government knows we (and our patients and employees) are de facto untouchable. At the end of the summer we fly back and present our accomplishments to the med school.
The representative of the mysterious benefactor applauds our work and says "Bravo, and I'm glad you're back in one piece. Because that whole diplomatic and political
backing bit was just a smoke screen to make you feel safe and therefore motivated to be more effective in your mission."
Would I be really angry, and justified in feeling that way? Absolutely. Of course, I also easily concede that by believing in this false safety net, we might have accomplished more. Does that justify this yahoo having lied to us - and justify that we consequently put our employees and patients in danger, since they've been nonchalantly telling the secret police to go f*** themselves every time they show up looking for bribes?
Of course, the clearest parallel here is to missionary work (and interestingly, missionaries are indeed sometimes the target of violence even though they're spreading the Word into new realms supposedly under the protection of their deity.)
The exact same moral argument applies to religious claims to moral motivation in general. If it's immoral to lie to someone about false comforts to inspire them to greater deeds, then there's no point in the discussion moving on to "look at all the good it does" until the first question - whether it's true - has been abundantly established. It has not.
Friday, April 24, 2009
*Actual Data* on Debate Conversion Rates
A few months ago, atheist rhetorical Sith Lord Christopher Hitchens debated Dinesh D'Souza at the University of Colorado. Fortunately, there was a survey (which we need more of) on audience positions before and after the debate. And what was Darth Hitchens' immediate conversion rate? Hitchens gained 1%, D'Souza lost 2%. That's it. D'Souza isn't an idiot, but he's no MLK either, as far as rhetoric goes, and still even the Hitch only got a few inches of territory, at least by the time the audience walked out. Maybe that number would go up in a month or a year, but someone has to collect that data before we know.
These posts on Overcoming Bias and Marginal Revolution were interesting for the same reason: someone collected before and after- debate data from the audience, and found a consistent advantage for the minority position. The graphs are the best.
The authors offer possibilities for the mechanism of this minority-position advantage, and to this list I would add another possibility: holders of the audience's majority position are less likely than holders of the minority position to have been previously exposed to the other side's arguments. Minority position holders already know the counterarguments, whereas majority position holders are more likely to be hearing them for the first time. Concretely – we as atheists are much more likely to have already heard Bible verse X:Y cited in argument than a Christian will have heard any Dawkins or Hume. Which is why debates are good, and public discourse is better. So get out there and expose people!
These posts on Overcoming Bias and Marginal Revolution were interesting for the same reason: someone collected before and after- debate data from the audience, and found a consistent advantage for the minority position. The graphs are the best.
The authors offer possibilities for the mechanism of this minority-position advantage, and to this list I would add another possibility: holders of the audience's majority position are less likely than holders of the minority position to have been previously exposed to the other side's arguments. Minority position holders already know the counterarguments, whereas majority position holders are more likely to be hearing them for the first time. Concretely – we as atheists are much more likely to have already heard Bible verse X:Y cited in argument than a Christian will have heard any Dawkins or Hume. Which is why debates are good, and public discourse is better. So get out there and expose people!
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Prediction and Moral Principles
Political afiliations are very similar to religious ones, in the sense that there is substantial doublethink, which leads to double standards. Action X is bad if your side does it, but okay if my side does. Or if my side does it, at least it was for a good reason; or if my side does it, it's called a different thing; or, this discussion makes me uncomfortable and I refuse to talk about it, and how dare you be so confrontational as to insist on a single standard for everyone (most common approach). Most of us outside hunter-gatherer villages understand that moral principles are independent of your connection to the person undertaking a specific action. An act is right or wrong, regardless of whether it's your friend or enemy who does it.
Moral principles are like theories in that their usefulness relies on their acommodation of new information, not just how exactly they account for the past. In 2008 I won my office pool for the NCAA basketball tournament, basing my win-loss predictions on data from the season. Turns out I was just lucky, and my little statistical model this year left me with a 60% track record compared to my 94% last year. Of course, I could always keep massaging the data to come up with ugly, clunky statistical models that could spit out the exact outcome of every game played up until that point, but was that meaningful? No! They never successfully predicted the next round. It's the same as writing a chess program that can avoid the losing moves in matches that were already played. It's the next game that counts.
I don't know what the statistics term is for this insistence on reproducing the exact irregularities of all past data, but the equivalent in morality is called hypocrisy. Moral principles fall apart the same way as theories when they're used for identity-based ex-post-facto justification. It's very frustrating to watch people insisting (probably without being aware of it) that X is okay, because their in-group did it, and criticize someone else's group (athletic, political, religious, etc.) for doing the same thing. This works only because they subconsciously adjust their apparently very wishy-washy moral principles based on who did it, not what they did.
But what about hypothetical future acts? For "team-player" morality, hypothetical questions can't be answered because you don't know who did it. But what about something that really did happen, and you don't know who did it? This is where the blinded moral taste-test comes in handy. It works for politics: make a list of laws and policy decisions made by a few different politicians, some which the test-taker likes, some which s/he doesn't. Don't include names of executives or legislators next to them - and ask people to check "good" or "bad" for each. Hey, if you believe in such a thing as right and wrong, what's the problem?
The most fun moral taste test is of course, with sacred texts - assuming scriptures are a source of morality in the first place. Pick up a Bible and a Qu'ran, pick out verses at random for a Christian or Muslim friends, and remove any identifying names and ask if the verse is good or bad. Yes, this will make your friends squirm, and many people will flatly refuse to do it at all because they realize the implications of their being unable to pick which verses are the "good" ones. It means that the text is not the source of their morality, and/or that they don't behave according to moral principle. They just play for the team; whatever the team does is right. If they were in your office pool, these people would demand to see the winners of the games that they were betting on.
All of us humans have this tendency. I try to get it out of my system by going to sports games and amusing myself by yelling at the refs for any call that goes against my team, no matter how blatant the violation was. Then again, my team is Penn State, which really is morally perfect. But in all seriousness, we're talking about something more important than sports - we're talking about the principles according to which we live our lives. We owe it to ourselves as human beings to be consistent.
Moral principles are like theories in that their usefulness relies on their acommodation of new information, not just how exactly they account for the past. In 2008 I won my office pool for the NCAA basketball tournament, basing my win-loss predictions on data from the season. Turns out I was just lucky, and my little statistical model this year left me with a 60% track record compared to my 94% last year. Of course, I could always keep massaging the data to come up with ugly, clunky statistical models that could spit out the exact outcome of every game played up until that point, but was that meaningful? No! They never successfully predicted the next round. It's the same as writing a chess program that can avoid the losing moves in matches that were already played. It's the next game that counts.
I don't know what the statistics term is for this insistence on reproducing the exact irregularities of all past data, but the equivalent in morality is called hypocrisy. Moral principles fall apart the same way as theories when they're used for identity-based ex-post-facto justification. It's very frustrating to watch people insisting (probably without being aware of it) that X is okay, because their in-group did it, and criticize someone else's group (athletic, political, religious, etc.) for doing the same thing. This works only because they subconsciously adjust their apparently very wishy-washy moral principles based on who did it, not what they did.
But what about hypothetical future acts? For "team-player" morality, hypothetical questions can't be answered because you don't know who did it. But what about something that really did happen, and you don't know who did it? This is where the blinded moral taste-test comes in handy. It works for politics: make a list of laws and policy decisions made by a few different politicians, some which the test-taker likes, some which s/he doesn't. Don't include names of executives or legislators next to them - and ask people to check "good" or "bad" for each. Hey, if you believe in such a thing as right and wrong, what's the problem?
The most fun moral taste test is of course, with sacred texts - assuming scriptures are a source of morality in the first place. Pick up a Bible and a Qu'ran, pick out verses at random for a Christian or Muslim friends, and remove any identifying names and ask if the verse is good or bad. Yes, this will make your friends squirm, and many people will flatly refuse to do it at all because they realize the implications of their being unable to pick which verses are the "good" ones. It means that the text is not the source of their morality, and/or that they don't behave according to moral principle. They just play for the team; whatever the team does is right. If they were in your office pool, these people would demand to see the winners of the games that they were betting on.
All of us humans have this tendency. I try to get it out of my system by going to sports games and amusing myself by yelling at the refs for any call that goes against my team, no matter how blatant the violation was. Then again, my team is Penn State, which really is morally perfect. But in all seriousness, we're talking about something more important than sports - we're talking about the principles according to which we live our lives. We owe it to ourselves as human beings to be consistent.
Another Transition Fossil - Get Ready for the Excuse Mill
PZ Myers writes about the new otter-to-seal transition fossil found in the Canadian Arctic. This is yet another nifty river-to-sea transition to add to the pile, along with the land-dwelling whale-ancestor pakicetus.
Of course like PZ I can't resist rubbing my hands together with glee, waiting for the crazy excuses from crationists of what this fossil means (though disappointingly, I expect ear-splitting silence). But I'll tell you what - if tomorrow I woke up and had somehow become a creationist, I would start submitting plans for fossil-digging expeditions to whatever creationist institutions I could find. Why? When there are two competing theories, two genuine honest theories with supporters of each thinking that each is actually the best explanation, those supporters get out there and gather data like nobody's business. In paleontology, that means digging in the ground.
So where are all the creationist fossil expeditions? Particularly in the U.S. - since so many Americans support creationism (which I don't doubt) why aren't there any? Afraid of what they'll find? Or no need to look for evidence when you can learn it all from a book (in which case, why look for evidence for anything?) Serious question for creationists, next time you're talking to them.
Of course like PZ I can't resist rubbing my hands together with glee, waiting for the crazy excuses from crationists of what this fossil means (though disappointingly, I expect ear-splitting silence). But I'll tell you what - if tomorrow I woke up and had somehow become a creationist, I would start submitting plans for fossil-digging expeditions to whatever creationist institutions I could find. Why? When there are two competing theories, two genuine honest theories with supporters of each thinking that each is actually the best explanation, those supporters get out there and gather data like nobody's business. In paleontology, that means digging in the ground.
So where are all the creationist fossil expeditions? Particularly in the U.S. - since so many Americans support creationism (which I don't doubt) why aren't there any? Afraid of what they'll find? Or no need to look for evidence when you can learn it all from a book (in which case, why look for evidence for anything?) Serious question for creationists, next time you're talking to them.
We Don't Have Free Will of Belief
I'm speaking in the philosophical, not the political sense. In democracies, we are allowed to believe whatever we want (clearly, judging by the observable breadth of nuttiness). What I mean is this: imagine you're driving home from work one day and you look up at a hill on your way home. You notice copious clouds of black smoke boiling up from it. You will likely now believe that the hill is on fire. You don't choose to believe it; saying you choose to believe it implies that you could look up at the hill, see the smoke, and still believe that nothing was different from the day before. The facts force your beliefs, if there's any congruence at all between your mind and the outside world.
Clearly well-meaning, honest people can look at the same situation and take two different interpretations away from it, even things as basic as looking at a sign and reading a word on it that's not there. But without digressing fully into the labyrinth of human psychology, it is clear that beliefs are not consciously chosen, and not subject to free will. Regardless of whether it's a mentally healthy person observing smoke and believing there's a fire, or a mentally ill person who believes that the CIA has projected a hologram of smoke to get you to turn around so they can catch you, or a religious person who believes the Rapture has begun.
In the same vein, an atheist can't suddenly decide to believe in supernatural beings, any more than a Christian can decide to suddenly stop believing in one - unless either of them gets new information, which might just be new ways of connecting or evaluating information they already had. Discussion is good for this. Social involvement is better. Get to know reasonable religious people. Volunteer with them for whatever secular or close-to-secular activities you can find, and be an example of a good atheist. For most religious people, this will be new information. That's why exposure to atheists or even to other religions is often enough to either devert people or at least move them a step away from politically ambitious religion.
The determinism of belief makes Pascal's Wager all the more interesting, because as Christopher Hitchens frequently points out, Pascal in his own description of it conceded that there are those "so made that they cannot believe". Because he seems to be recognizing the determinism of belief, this begs the question of whether he was really just telling nonbelievers to shut their mouths and they might trick God. Yet another problem with the Wager!
Clearly well-meaning, honest people can look at the same situation and take two different interpretations away from it, even things as basic as looking at a sign and reading a word on it that's not there. But without digressing fully into the labyrinth of human psychology, it is clear that beliefs are not consciously chosen, and not subject to free will. Regardless of whether it's a mentally healthy person observing smoke and believing there's a fire, or a mentally ill person who believes that the CIA has projected a hologram of smoke to get you to turn around so they can catch you, or a religious person who believes the Rapture has begun.
In the same vein, an atheist can't suddenly decide to believe in supernatural beings, any more than a Christian can decide to suddenly stop believing in one - unless either of them gets new information, which might just be new ways of connecting or evaluating information they already had. Discussion is good for this. Social involvement is better. Get to know reasonable religious people. Volunteer with them for whatever secular or close-to-secular activities you can find, and be an example of a good atheist. For most religious people, this will be new information. That's why exposure to atheists or even to other religions is often enough to either devert people or at least move them a step away from politically ambitious religion.
The determinism of belief makes Pascal's Wager all the more interesting, because as Christopher Hitchens frequently points out, Pascal in his own description of it conceded that there are those "so made that they cannot believe". Because he seems to be recognizing the determinism of belief, this begs the question of whether he was really just telling nonbelievers to shut their mouths and they might trick God. Yet another problem with the Wager!
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Atheists: Courage, Questions, and Anti-Fatalism
Have you seen the climbing documentary Touching the Void?
It's easily the best climbing film I've ever seen. Two British climbers, Joe Simpson and Simon Yates, had an accident during their descent from the west face of Siula Grande in the Bolivian Andes. In the course of the accident Simpson ended up inside the glacier that he'd fallen into, deep within its tomb-like dim blue recesses with only the eerie echoing creaks of the slowly moving ice shelf in the gloom around him. Glaciers are scary, unearthly things even to walk across, much less to be trapped inside when you're badly injured. But Simpson said that he knew at the time you have to keep making decisions, or you're cooked.
That active approach to dealing with the world is the sign of an active and healthy mind. When you're confronted with a daunting challenge, one so complex that you can't even fully understand it - maybe no one can - what's the the response that's most courageous, and most likely to have results? Immediately writing the whole thing off to fate and the whims of unseen entities, or trying to understand it so you can do something, and ignoring all the reasons everyone else can think of not to even try.
I wrote before that optimism and pessimism are somewhat pointless distinctions, if strictly addressing them as ways of looking at the world; passively looking at things in the world and assigning a value of good or bad to them is meaningless. The more important distinction is between fatalism and anti-fatalism, for lack of a better term. In the face of a mystery or a challenge, even a seemingly inexplicable one, a rationalist will take responsibility, rely on him or herself, and assume the problem can be solved and try to solve it or understand it. But when faced with a tough problem when figuring out how the world works, the religious are tempted with a universal out, a black box that everything can be hidden in: God did it. Questioning terminated, as is perserverance. No need to find something else concrete you know about the world to link this to in an effort to understand and solve, just let it go. It's clear who the fatalist is in this situation.
Joe Simpson got out of the glacier alive and crawled miles back to camp with a badly broken leg, over fields of boulders. He relied on himself, he refused to accept ignorance of his situation no matter how bleak, and he refused to give up. Simpson was raised Catholic but by the time of this climb, he no longer considered himself a believer. When discussing whether he thought about praying while he was stuck in the glacier, he said that it had never once crossed his mind.
It's easily the best climbing film I've ever seen. Two British climbers, Joe Simpson and Simon Yates, had an accident during their descent from the west face of Siula Grande in the Bolivian Andes. In the course of the accident Simpson ended up inside the glacier that he'd fallen into, deep within its tomb-like dim blue recesses with only the eerie echoing creaks of the slowly moving ice shelf in the gloom around him. Glaciers are scary, unearthly things even to walk across, much less to be trapped inside when you're badly injured. But Simpson said that he knew at the time you have to keep making decisions, or you're cooked.
That active approach to dealing with the world is the sign of an active and healthy mind. When you're confronted with a daunting challenge, one so complex that you can't even fully understand it - maybe no one can - what's the the response that's most courageous, and most likely to have results? Immediately writing the whole thing off to fate and the whims of unseen entities, or trying to understand it so you can do something, and ignoring all the reasons everyone else can think of not to even try.
I wrote before that optimism and pessimism are somewhat pointless distinctions, if strictly addressing them as ways of looking at the world; passively looking at things in the world and assigning a value of good or bad to them is meaningless. The more important distinction is between fatalism and anti-fatalism, for lack of a better term. In the face of a mystery or a challenge, even a seemingly inexplicable one, a rationalist will take responsibility, rely on him or herself, and assume the problem can be solved and try to solve it or understand it. But when faced with a tough problem when figuring out how the world works, the religious are tempted with a universal out, a black box that everything can be hidden in: God did it. Questioning terminated, as is perserverance. No need to find something else concrete you know about the world to link this to in an effort to understand and solve, just let it go. It's clear who the fatalist is in this situation.
Joe Simpson got out of the glacier alive and crawled miles back to camp with a badly broken leg, over fields of boulders. He relied on himself, he refused to accept ignorance of his situation no matter how bleak, and he refused to give up. Simpson was raised Catholic but by the time of this climb, he no longer considered himself a believer. When discussing whether he thought about praying while he was stuck in the glacier, he said that it had never once crossed his mind.
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Hitler Was Catholic, Again
The Catholic Bishop Mixa of Augsburg, Germany said at the Easter service this year:
Buddy: you didn't check the rolls before the sermon to see that Hitler was a practicing Catholic? You didn't stop to think that your church neglected to excommunicate a single Nazi for their actions? And you just plum forgot about the Inquisition and the enslavement and sometime genocide of Africans and Native Americans?
It is reasonable to argue that, more than any other institution, the Church was in a position to stop the Holocaust. Yet not only did it not, it apparently didn't see anything wrong with the tragedy even in its aftermath, and now its officers deny their involvement to cover their asses. Hitler was Catholic, Hitler was Catholic, Hitler was Catholic, and we're onto your strategy, Church. It's losing steam. Go back to helping HIV spread.
Bald-faced revisionism at its worst. It takes a lot to get my blood pressure up but this got me. Fortunately our colleagues in German atheist groups are having at him.
"Decades past have proven the inhumanity of atheism through the godless regimes of National Socialism and communism, with their penal camps, secret police and mass murder. Wherever God is denied or fought against, there, humans and their dignity will also be denied and violated."
Buddy: you didn't check the rolls before the sermon to see that Hitler was a practicing Catholic? You didn't stop to think that your church neglected to excommunicate a single Nazi for their actions? And you just plum forgot about the Inquisition and the enslavement and sometime genocide of Africans and Native Americans?
It is reasonable to argue that, more than any other institution, the Church was in a position to stop the Holocaust. Yet not only did it not, it apparently didn't see anything wrong with the tragedy even in its aftermath, and now its officers deny their involvement to cover their asses. Hitler was Catholic, Hitler was Catholic, Hitler was Catholic, and we're onto your strategy, Church. It's losing steam. Go back to helping HIV spread.
Bald-faced revisionism at its worst. It takes a lot to get my blood pressure up but this got me. Fortunately our colleagues in German atheist groups are having at him.
Let's Assign Teams to Anti-Materialist Windbags
When there's a complex task that needs doin', and you have people to throw at it, what do you do? You form a team, just like you do in the military or at a company or in a volunteer organization. So why don't we do it for anti-materialist windbags?
By anti-materialist I mean (for example): evolution deniers of all stripes; people uncomfortable with a materialistic view of the mind; homeopathic medicine types, just to name a few. In short, anyone who makes appeals to non fact- or reason-based arguments (or attacks on fact and reason) to support their cause.
I had this thought while reading Steven Novella's Neurologica Blog, and it occurred to me that Novella seems to have assigned himself as Michael Egnor's personal tormentor. I love reading Novella's dissections of Egnor, because that's what they are. Novella doesn't so much argue with Egnor (when he appears in person) as use him as a third person subject. Reading Novella's essays, one is left with the following impression: "Ladies and gentleman, witness the subject's chain of fallacies in Argument A; subject displays a history of contact with the Discovery Institute and has been defeated similarly in the past. Witness the predictable ad hominem reaction when I administer Argument C."
So what's stopping us from organizing ourselves into teams to neutralize the cognitive pollution these people spew? By that I mean: write about them on your blog, do news searches and leave comments on any article about them, and above all keep them honest to statements they've made in the past, the usefulness of which we've seen recently with Rick Warren.
The first thing to do is create a Top 10 list of anti-materialists. Give your two cents in the comments! Focus on how much harm they can do. So Kent Hovind would not be on it, because he's a jailbird. But Anne Coulter might be, because even though she's not principally known as a creationist, she has a huge audience and can do more to reinforce people. It's not just about creationism either - would Jenny "Inject Me With Silicone But Not MMR" McCarthy be on the list? Important point: for the religion-based anti-materialists, it's difficult for many atheists to gauge the impact that figures have in the faith community. For those atheists who have religious family members, we need your input! So who should be on the Anti-Materialist Ten Most Wanted? Once we have that we can start volunteering for teams.
By anti-materialist I mean (for example): evolution deniers of all stripes; people uncomfortable with a materialistic view of the mind; homeopathic medicine types, just to name a few. In short, anyone who makes appeals to non fact- or reason-based arguments (or attacks on fact and reason) to support their cause.
I had this thought while reading Steven Novella's Neurologica Blog, and it occurred to me that Novella seems to have assigned himself as Michael Egnor's personal tormentor. I love reading Novella's dissections of Egnor, because that's what they are. Novella doesn't so much argue with Egnor (when he appears in person) as use him as a third person subject. Reading Novella's essays, one is left with the following impression: "Ladies and gentleman, witness the subject's chain of fallacies in Argument A; subject displays a history of contact with the Discovery Institute and has been defeated similarly in the past. Witness the predictable ad hominem reaction when I administer Argument C."
So what's stopping us from organizing ourselves into teams to neutralize the cognitive pollution these people spew? By that I mean: write about them on your blog, do news searches and leave comments on any article about them, and above all keep them honest to statements they've made in the past, the usefulness of which we've seen recently with Rick Warren.
The first thing to do is create a Top 10 list of anti-materialists. Give your two cents in the comments! Focus on how much harm they can do. So Kent Hovind would not be on it, because he's a jailbird. But Anne Coulter might be, because even though she's not principally known as a creationist, she has a huge audience and can do more to reinforce people. It's not just about creationism either - would Jenny "Inject Me With Silicone But Not MMR" McCarthy be on the list? Important point: for the religion-based anti-materialists, it's difficult for many atheists to gauge the impact that figures have in the faith community. For those atheists who have religious family members, we need your input! So who should be on the Anti-Materialist Ten Most Wanted? Once we have that we can start volunteering for teams.
Desperately Misunderstanding
Ideally, in rational discourse you have two or more parties both trying to get to a more accurate understanding of something. As Robin Hanson of Overcoming Bias said of a debate he was about to engage in, "If I'm lucky, maybe he'll change my mind". It's not a conflict, it's a collaboration.
But this is the experience of people genuinely trying to get to an answer. To do this, both must share assumptions about how we get to the truth, and whether in fact any one person has a lock on it. The reality of course is that most people don't debate in good faith; most people are invested in a position and even when presented with abundant evidence, don't change their position (or change it very gradually). This behavior is most common in religion and politics but it can happen in any venue where people disagree. One trick to tell quickly if you're in a bad-faith discussion: offer to paraphrase the other party's position. If they're genuinely after the truth, they'll enthusiastically agree. If they know their argument is paper thin or they want to reserve the right to change it on you later, they won't. It not only keeps you from wasting time, it signals to the other party that you're a good-faith partner in the conversation, and it can help you understand.
I do give people enough credit - even (especially) the religious - to assume that in these cases, they aren't deliberately concealing their arguments, they're just desperately avoiding understanding something. Arguments (whether logically valid or not) are just understanding-bridges from point A (what the audience now believes) to point B (what you want them to believe). People will do anything to avoid taking steps out onto that understanding-bridge. Two examples: repetition of known falsehoods, and misinterpretation of arguments. You know those "huh" non-sequitur moments? Like "Phineas Gage's personality may not have shifted as much as is commonly believed, therefore there cannot be a material basis for the mind and personality" or "Niagara Falls would erode away in a few thousand years, therefore, the Earth cannot be millions of years old". When I write out an argument, I'm constantly thinking "what could deflate this whole contraption; what objections can be made?" Not because I want to build "defenses", but rather if such objections are legitimate, they must either be anticipated and met, or the objections are severe, the argument is faulty and should be abandoned. Apparently top-down thinking folks are so eager to get back to their original position (and avoid stepping out onto your bridge) that they don't let themselves understand the point of the argument.
Repetition of known falsehoods is another way to avoid accidentally wandering out onto the bridge. I don't mean that the repeater knows they're false (they haven't fully accepted that) but that the falsehoods have been pointed out to them. I have a great non-religious example: I worked at a small biotech which was developing a certain delivery technology, and there was a nearby competitor company that had similar technology but was maybe 3 quarters ahead in the R&D cycle. Needless to say, people from both companies often ended up at the same conferences and presentations. The "enemy" CEO had a way of dropping subtle marginalizing, condescending words into his presentations - you know, how you can imply things, without making a direct assertion that can be attacked, so that objectors will seem to be nitpicking? One of his favorite tricks was to have (apparently) earnest trouble pronouncing my company's name, as if we were so unimportant that he couldn't be bothered to look it up. My colleagues had corrected him repeatedly. Now had I ever been present, I would have added "Also sir, that's the third time I've corrected you, so either you have memory problems or you're being sneaky, and neither are good CEO traits." Maybe that's why that company didn't send me to conferences. In that guy's case, I'm pretty sure he was deliberately lying. In (for example) Ray Comfort's case, I'll actually give him the benefit of the doubt that it just hurts his head to retain some of these uncomfortable facts that critics keep throwing at him. If I were Ray Comfort, I would study all these things so I could throw them back at my critics and say exactly why they were all wrong.
A rational good-faith discussion (pardon the pun) is like a dance - all parties are there for the same reason and want to end up the same place, even if they don't know exactly where at the start. A bad-faith discussion is like a tug of war across a bridge. You may not win by brute force immediately, but start putting a trail of tasty little treats down on the planks of your bridge - treats that they already like to begin with - and over time you'll get them further and further across.
Now, like a good rationalist you should be asking me for evidence. And that's why this weekend I'm going to put up the deversion poll I've been threatening. I've found that promising things to the atheist community is a good motivator. Remember my little chocolate promise for Yomkipmadanlent? Despite my sneaky wife's best efforts, I am currently in the longest (and easiest) chocolate-free phase of my life, thanks to you!
But this is the experience of people genuinely trying to get to an answer. To do this, both must share assumptions about how we get to the truth, and whether in fact any one person has a lock on it. The reality of course is that most people don't debate in good faith; most people are invested in a position and even when presented with abundant evidence, don't change their position (or change it very gradually). This behavior is most common in religion and politics but it can happen in any venue where people disagree. One trick to tell quickly if you're in a bad-faith discussion: offer to paraphrase the other party's position. If they're genuinely after the truth, they'll enthusiastically agree. If they know their argument is paper thin or they want to reserve the right to change it on you later, they won't. It not only keeps you from wasting time, it signals to the other party that you're a good-faith partner in the conversation, and it can help you understand.
I do give people enough credit - even (especially) the religious - to assume that in these cases, they aren't deliberately concealing their arguments, they're just desperately avoiding understanding something. Arguments (whether logically valid or not) are just understanding-bridges from point A (what the audience now believes) to point B (what you want them to believe). People will do anything to avoid taking steps out onto that understanding-bridge. Two examples: repetition of known falsehoods, and misinterpretation of arguments. You know those "huh" non-sequitur moments? Like "Phineas Gage's personality may not have shifted as much as is commonly believed, therefore there cannot be a material basis for the mind and personality" or "Niagara Falls would erode away in a few thousand years, therefore, the Earth cannot be millions of years old". When I write out an argument, I'm constantly thinking "what could deflate this whole contraption; what objections can be made?" Not because I want to build "defenses", but rather if such objections are legitimate, they must either be anticipated and met, or the objections are severe, the argument is faulty and should be abandoned. Apparently top-down thinking folks are so eager to get back to their original position (and avoid stepping out onto your bridge) that they don't let themselves understand the point of the argument.
Repetition of known falsehoods is another way to avoid accidentally wandering out onto the bridge. I don't mean that the repeater knows they're false (they haven't fully accepted that) but that the falsehoods have been pointed out to them. I have a great non-religious example: I worked at a small biotech which was developing a certain delivery technology, and there was a nearby competitor company that had similar technology but was maybe 3 quarters ahead in the R&D cycle. Needless to say, people from both companies often ended up at the same conferences and presentations. The "enemy" CEO had a way of dropping subtle marginalizing, condescending words into his presentations - you know, how you can imply things, without making a direct assertion that can be attacked, so that objectors will seem to be nitpicking? One of his favorite tricks was to have (apparently) earnest trouble pronouncing my company's name, as if we were so unimportant that he couldn't be bothered to look it up. My colleagues had corrected him repeatedly. Now had I ever been present, I would have added "Also sir, that's the third time I've corrected you, so either you have memory problems or you're being sneaky, and neither are good CEO traits." Maybe that's why that company didn't send me to conferences. In that guy's case, I'm pretty sure he was deliberately lying. In (for example) Ray Comfort's case, I'll actually give him the benefit of the doubt that it just hurts his head to retain some of these uncomfortable facts that critics keep throwing at him. If I were Ray Comfort, I would study all these things so I could throw them back at my critics and say exactly why they were all wrong.
A rational good-faith discussion (pardon the pun) is like a dance - all parties are there for the same reason and want to end up the same place, even if they don't know exactly where at the start. A bad-faith discussion is like a tug of war across a bridge. You may not win by brute force immediately, but start putting a trail of tasty little treats down on the planks of your bridge - treats that they already like to begin with - and over time you'll get them further and further across.
Now, like a good rationalist you should be asking me for evidence. And that's why this weekend I'm going to put up the deversion poll I've been threatening. I've found that promising things to the atheist community is a good motivator. Remember my little chocolate promise for Yomkipmadanlent? Despite my sneaky wife's best efforts, I am currently in the longest (and easiest) chocolate-free phase of my life, thanks to you!
La Santa Muerte
I ran across this fascinating article about a new cult in Mexican Catholicism. I've written before about henotheism, and specifically to my argument against Dawkins' comment that Hinduism is monotheism in disguise. Specifically, monotheism is really just polytheism but with God (or Allah or Yahweh or whoever) the unchallengeable chief of the pantheon, and the only one with a cult. Within Christianity, Catholicism seems to chip away even at the last part of that definition since there are little cults and orders all over the place, especially in Mexico - in this case, Saint Death.
Even more interesting, I got the link from the horrendous Post Darwinist blog, written by a confused Canadian who seems to think that philosophical materialism stopped being taken seriously decades ago (but who strangely goes on to spend lots of time debunking it). In this entry she calls the cult of Saint Death an entry in the "okay, okay, some religions ARE just plain bad file". Aw, that's so cute! I never ceased to be amazed how religious people are always ready to NOT take religion seriously (including their own) when doing so would be socially awkward; i.e., to her, abandoning a bunch of misguided and poorly educated people to hell for a laugh on her blog.
Even more interesting, I got the link from the horrendous Post Darwinist blog, written by a confused Canadian who seems to think that philosophical materialism stopped being taken seriously decades ago (but who strangely goes on to spend lots of time debunking it). In this entry she calls the cult of Saint Death an entry in the "okay, okay, some religions ARE just plain bad file". Aw, that's so cute! I never ceased to be amazed how religious people are always ready to NOT take religion seriously (including their own) when doing so would be socially awkward; i.e., to her, abandoning a bunch of misguided and poorly educated people to hell for a laugh on her blog.
The Flying Spaghetti Monster is Not Pleased With Obama!
It seems liberal presidents can't get love even from a parodic deity.
Crackpot Redux #2
Crackpots really are fascinating, and here's a This American Life radio story about yet another guy who's disproved physics, or so he thinks. Again, focus on the top-down approach to the world, the conviction that something is wrong because it's counterintuitive and difficult to understand.
To emphasize: what is it that makes this guy more harmless than, say, Rick Warren? Two things: his convictions about Einstein aren't confusing his innate moral sense;
and he's not part of an army of followers with mass political influence. Atheism is a political and social problem, not a logical or philosophical one - in fact, in those last two realms, there is literally no problem at all.
To emphasize: what is it that makes this guy more harmless than, say, Rick Warren? Two things: his convictions about Einstein aren't confusing his innate moral sense;
and he's not part of an army of followers with mass political influence. Atheism is a political and social problem, not a logical or philosophical one - in fact, in those last two realms, there is literally no problem at all.
Pile on Rick Warren
Old Rick seems to have discovered the wonders of modernity in recent days - for example, the accountability for one's words that the internet helps enforce. One of his comments in an interview with Hugh Hewitt:
Guess where this is going? Sorry, Rick: I had a great relationship with my dad, and though I'm sorry to say I lost him when I was only 22, I think about him every single day. I'll grant that I'm not as well-known as Russell or Freud (not yet :) but does that make a difference?
But hey, maybe I'm the exception. What's everyone else's family life like? I don't know a lot of dad-hating atheists out there, now that I think about it. I'd love to see a survey of parental relationships and religious attitudes.
Paul Vitz, who is an author with New York University, wrote a very fascinating book called Faith Of The Fathers, in which he went and studied the 72 most well-known atheists in history, the Bertrand Russells, the Voltaires, the Freuds, and the only thing he could find in common with every one of them is they all hated their dads. Every one of them. They had distant dad, demeaning dad, a dead dad, they had no relationships with their fathers.
Guess where this is going? Sorry, Rick: I had a great relationship with my dad, and though I'm sorry to say I lost him when I was only 22, I think about him every single day. I'll grant that I'm not as well-known as Russell or Freud (not yet :) but does that make a difference?
But hey, maybe I'm the exception. What's everyone else's family life like? I don't know a lot of dad-hating atheists out there, now that I think about it. I'd love to see a survey of parental relationships and religious attitudes.
Miracles Are Against American Values
I'm getting increasingly puzzled by the faithful's insistence on miracles explaining things which are in reality the result of competence, education, cool under fire and smart decision-making - that is to say, rejecting all value placed on personal responsibility (and by the way, that's a good talking point for discussions with the religious, since that's a value they prize). A reader sent this link about trees falling on a house and this one about a plane crash. Why are the faithful so desperate to avoid recognizing the performance of the people involved? Is it really so scary to instead recognize the power of personal responsibility and hard work and education and basic cause and effect really?
Interestingly enough, none of these miracles violate the known laws of nature. Why doesn't God just levitate falling planes and trees? The same kinds of questions can be asked in medicine - God heals lizard and crab amputees; why not people? In fact the miracles are never anything that can't be explained by the normal function of the laws of nature, along with courage and clearheadedness of the parties involved. And why is the miracle-requiring problem allowed to happen in the first place? And why don't miracles save everyone? The parents of Sandra Cantu, the eight-year-old girl murdered in a church by her Sunday school teacher last week, might be asking this question right now: this girl was right in God's cross-hairs, and He did nothing.
The non-answer is "We don't know God's plan." (That's a great one, because you can remind people of that the next time they try to quote Scripture.) In other words, when something good happens, of course, God's in charge; when something bad happens, we must admit we don't know God's mind. A smart-ass might suggest that we turn it around. Something bad happens, of course, Satan's in charge; something good happens, and of course we don't know Satan's plan.
Final question: what's the miracle cut-off? I was hungry when I got up this morning. I looked in my fridge and there was yogurt! It's a miracle! Never mind that my wife bought it yesterday and put it there; she was guided by Providence. Or: I turn the key in my car's ignition, and it starts! Praise the Ford, it's a miracle!
If these aren't miracles, why, exactly, are they not?
Meanwhile, next time there's a car crash or a surgery or a plane crash where despite all odds, most people come out of it okay, take the time to praise the dedication and courage of the people involved - and don't be afraid to tell the miracle-mongers how insulting to the human spirit they actually are.
Interestingly enough, none of these miracles violate the known laws of nature. Why doesn't God just levitate falling planes and trees? The same kinds of questions can be asked in medicine - God heals lizard and crab amputees; why not people? In fact the miracles are never anything that can't be explained by the normal function of the laws of nature, along with courage and clearheadedness of the parties involved. And why is the miracle-requiring problem allowed to happen in the first place? And why don't miracles save everyone? The parents of Sandra Cantu, the eight-year-old girl murdered in a church by her Sunday school teacher last week, might be asking this question right now: this girl was right in God's cross-hairs, and He did nothing.
The non-answer is "We don't know God's plan." (That's a great one, because you can remind people of that the next time they try to quote Scripture.) In other words, when something good happens, of course, God's in charge; when something bad happens, we must admit we don't know God's mind. A smart-ass might suggest that we turn it around. Something bad happens, of course, Satan's in charge; something good happens, and of course we don't know Satan's plan.
Final question: what's the miracle cut-off? I was hungry when I got up this morning. I looked in my fridge and there was yogurt! It's a miracle! Never mind that my wife bought it yesterday and put it there; she was guided by Providence. Or: I turn the key in my car's ignition, and it starts! Praise the Ford, it's a miracle!
If these aren't miracles, why, exactly, are they not?
Meanwhile, next time there's a car crash or a surgery or a plane crash where despite all odds, most people come out of it okay, take the time to praise the dedication and courage of the people involved - and don't be afraid to tell the miracle-mongers how insulting to the human spirit they actually are.
Monday, April 13, 2009
Scariest Radio Rant I've Heard Yet
Last night I was driving back from Sacramento to Oakland and was staying awake by listening to a local Christian station (KCBC 770 AM) when I ran across this guy: Richard Berlanga.
Although the reception was scratchy, here's what I could make out: that the End Times are upon us (half Oil Crash, half Revelations), that in the end of civilization we'll have to make some unpleasant decisions, and that you should get ready to kill your neighbors to defend your family. I think he said to do it with a sword, but I might have misheard this part. Whether or not the sword was just static, I'm certain that I understood the part about neighbor-killing, which is about when I sat up and took notice.
Not surprisingly, the station eventually broke in to his broadcast with some excuse that he was "out of time", ended the freak show, and switched to other programming. Now I like a barely coherent out-of-control rant as much as the next person, but when someone on your air is openly exhorting people to violence, the only responsible thing to do is cut him off, and that's what they did.
I'm glad they made this decision, but why would they? After all, throughout Deuteronomy there are exhortations to exterminate Canaanite neighbors, so why the problem with violence against infidel neighbors here? The reason the management of the station did the right thing is because they're good people who do not really take their morality from the Bible. There's no commandment about not shouting fire in a crowded theater, which is what Berlanga was doing, and yet they recognized that letting him continue his rant would be reprehensible.
Although the reception was scratchy, here's what I could make out: that the End Times are upon us (half Oil Crash, half Revelations), that in the end of civilization we'll have to make some unpleasant decisions, and that you should get ready to kill your neighbors to defend your family. I think he said to do it with a sword, but I might have misheard this part. Whether or not the sword was just static, I'm certain that I understood the part about neighbor-killing, which is about when I sat up and took notice.
Not surprisingly, the station eventually broke in to his broadcast with some excuse that he was "out of time", ended the freak show, and switched to other programming. Now I like a barely coherent out-of-control rant as much as the next person, but when someone on your air is openly exhorting people to violence, the only responsible thing to do is cut him off, and that's what they did.
I'm glad they made this decision, but why would they? After all, throughout Deuteronomy there are exhortations to exterminate Canaanite neighbors, so why the problem with violence against infidel neighbors here? The reason the management of the station did the right thing is because they're good people who do not really take their morality from the Bible. There's no commandment about not shouting fire in a crowded theater, which is what Berlanga was doing, and yet they recognized that letting him continue his rant would be reprehensible.
Shamans Get More Votes In Blue Oblasts
Thanks to Zaphod (real name) for this link about Russia's first shaman election. Really. After you read it, ask yourself: where do you go for file photos on shamans?
Also ask yourself where to begin ennumerating the problems with such an election, least among them that the candidates list their kettle collections as a reason to select them. But this is a perfect example of the problem of church-state intermingling. Russia has found it challenging to maintain any semblance of democracy, and Vladimir Putin, not known for his democratic tendencies, had moved Russia back toward its good old czarist days in several important steps before fading into the background behind Dmitri Medvedev. One such step was reappointing the Orthodox Church as the official church of Russia, leading Christopher Hitchens to state that "we will live to regret the conversion of Russia into a heavily-armed, self-pitying, chauvinistic theocracy".
Indeed, it seems odd that the same government that just readopted the Czar's church would now also be picking official shamans. Of course, it's more about using organized religion as a political tool, and taming minority religions; once the state has given itself the power to legitimize religious leaders, that religion becomes a state organ. China has attempted exactly the same trick in Tibet. The Chinese government sees no conflict (or human-rights incursion) with simultaneously choosing an official Lama to reign in Tibetan Buddhism (the Panchen Lama) and giving out an annual atheist award. This is where we have to be clear about what a secular government is - it's one which does not take a positive position on the validity of any religion, or on their lack thereof. This is exactly why I find the atheist award just as creepy as the official CCP-designated Lama.
How do these intrigues of the Orient affect American atheists? Simple. They provide a powerful argument for separation of church and state that we can use with religious conservatives. There are many pro-separation Christians who understand this point clearly. Middle Eastern theocracies are a good place to start, but in Russia and China we have places notorious in the U.S. more for their lack of democratic values. They're a great jumping-off point for asking people whether they really want their values and faith being dictated by a worldly government if these are the consequences. In the modern world, the church in question usually becomes a pet of the state. It reminds me of a bumper sticker I saw in the wake of the David Koresh-Branch Davidian incident in Waco: is YOUR church ATF-approved?
Also ask yourself where to begin ennumerating the problems with such an election, least among them that the candidates list their kettle collections as a reason to select them. But this is a perfect example of the problem of church-state intermingling. Russia has found it challenging to maintain any semblance of democracy, and Vladimir Putin, not known for his democratic tendencies, had moved Russia back toward its good old czarist days in several important steps before fading into the background behind Dmitri Medvedev. One such step was reappointing the Orthodox Church as the official church of Russia, leading Christopher Hitchens to state that "we will live to regret the conversion of Russia into a heavily-armed, self-pitying, chauvinistic theocracy".
Indeed, it seems odd that the same government that just readopted the Czar's church would now also be picking official shamans. Of course, it's more about using organized religion as a political tool, and taming minority religions; once the state has given itself the power to legitimize religious leaders, that religion becomes a state organ. China has attempted exactly the same trick in Tibet. The Chinese government sees no conflict (or human-rights incursion) with simultaneously choosing an official Lama to reign in Tibetan Buddhism (the Panchen Lama) and giving out an annual atheist award. This is where we have to be clear about what a secular government is - it's one which does not take a positive position on the validity of any religion, or on their lack thereof. This is exactly why I find the atheist award just as creepy as the official CCP-designated Lama.
How do these intrigues of the Orient affect American atheists? Simple. They provide a powerful argument for separation of church and state that we can use with religious conservatives. There are many pro-separation Christians who understand this point clearly. Middle Eastern theocracies are a good place to start, but in Russia and China we have places notorious in the U.S. more for their lack of democratic values. They're a great jumping-off point for asking people whether they really want their values and faith being dictated by a worldly government if these are the consequences. In the modern world, the church in question usually becomes a pet of the state. It reminds me of a bumper sticker I saw in the wake of the David Koresh-Branch Davidian incident in Waco: is YOUR church ATF-approved?
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Enjoy the Outdoors? Make an Atheist Difference!
Camp Quest West, the secular summer camp, is looking for camp counselors for its weeklong camp in California this coming July in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. I did this in 2006 and it was fantastic. If you're interested, contact Chris Lindstrom at chris, then @, then camp-quest.org. Learn more at http://west.camp-quest.org/.
Even if you can't do it, please forward this blog link - the kids need us!
Even if you can't do it, please forward this blog link - the kids need us!
Friday, April 10, 2009
What Does "Religion" Mean?
I was about to comment on a post at the excellent blog Lesswrong, but realized my main point was different than the author's. In brief, the post author asks why rational thinkers find theism such a uniquely well-suited example of bad thinking. The discussion in the comments is definitely worth reading.
One thing we find as atheists is that we continue having to re-invent and reclaim terminology and thought habits that have been polluted or distorted by religion. Even after two and a half centuries of Enlightenment, we aren't nearly done with the housecleaning. An important example is the effort to clearly ground morality in facts, reason, and human biology. As it turns out, reason and fact-based morality is the kind most people practice, whether they're religious or not. In the case of the religious they do so despite confusing input from religion that is either destructive, superfluous, or has to be explained away with complicated theological gyrations. "It's okay to eat shellfish, because Jesus passed on amendment on that in the New Testament." "It's okay to be gay even though it says right here it's an abomination because...hey, look over there!" (Sound of running away.)
The terms which religion uses for itself, and the assumptions folded away inside them, should be made subject to these same secular re-examinations; chiefly among them, the concept of religion itself. I think that what we refer to as religion are really two different things. First, there's the individual spirituality that results from the short circuits of human cognition; it may be influenced by neighbors, and it's often polytheistic (think of deism, New Ageism, or shamanism). Then, there's the monotheistic evangelical organization tool with a political component (Islam, Christianity, Scientology). The difference is bound up in whether the institution seeks political power, and whether it spreads. It's the difference between two little girls with a lemonade stand going through the motions of trade, and General Electric. Yes, both are businesses, of a kind. How useful is it to use the same word to refer to both? Looked at in this way, the period before the spread of Abrahamic religions seems like a theological pre-Cambrian.
The next step is to ask exactly what the word "God" actually means, as Western Christians use it. You'll frequently find that people are completely clueless about the differences between their own sect and others. Then ask people from the same sect to describe the nature of God. Not only will their descriptions contradict each other, they'll likely contradict the basic teachings of their sect on this question. Also interestingly, many religious people shrink from such a question, feeling as if it isn't their place to think about such matters (if you're really serious about your faith, shouldn't you think about such matters every day?) The kinds of answers you will get are Loving, Kind, Vengeful, or the theological CYA that We Can't Understand Him. What we're talking about here lies on a problem-of-reference spectrum. It's somewhere between young children and schizophrenics can tell you all about their imaginary friend's dress and shoes or the physical description of the CIA agent that follows them around, and on the other hand statements like "Romeo and Juliet are Thai". Everyone knows Romeo and Juliet aren't real, so it's okay to give them specific characteristics.
To avoid these philosophical imbroglii, we can think of what God means in behavioral terms – how people observably act when the word is used. From that perspective, for most people who call themselves theists, "God" is a set of sounds with little semantic content, but that signals "I am part of this group, adhere to its values and rituals, and accept the authority of its Scripture and leaders". If you ask people to discuss the nature of their God they generally come up blank, or even say things directly in contradiction to what their religion holds.
Frustrating though this might seem, it's great news for atheists talking to on-the-fence people. An all-out full frontal assault on the very concept of God a) ensures that the shields go up and b) it's not a central concept to most religious people anyway. So focus on the practical benefits of being an atheist. Focus on the things that materialists/rationalists/secularists do to make the world a better place, on the enriching effect of the atheists that you've met since you've "come out", and the fact that they would have (mostly) the same friends if they were to defect. Most of all, focus on how it helps you to be a good person, since this seems to be a big concern for doubting theists. Even if all you do is get them to be a homebody Christian instead of a church-every-Sunday Christian, you'll get them away from their regular reinforcement, and that's an accomplishment.
One thing we find as atheists is that we continue having to re-invent and reclaim terminology and thought habits that have been polluted or distorted by religion. Even after two and a half centuries of Enlightenment, we aren't nearly done with the housecleaning. An important example is the effort to clearly ground morality in facts, reason, and human biology. As it turns out, reason and fact-based morality is the kind most people practice, whether they're religious or not. In the case of the religious they do so despite confusing input from religion that is either destructive, superfluous, or has to be explained away with complicated theological gyrations. "It's okay to eat shellfish, because Jesus passed on amendment on that in the New Testament." "It's okay to be gay even though it says right here it's an abomination because...hey, look over there!" (Sound of running away.)
The terms which religion uses for itself, and the assumptions folded away inside them, should be made subject to these same secular re-examinations; chiefly among them, the concept of religion itself. I think that what we refer to as religion are really two different things. First, there's the individual spirituality that results from the short circuits of human cognition; it may be influenced by neighbors, and it's often polytheistic (think of deism, New Ageism, or shamanism). Then, there's the monotheistic evangelical organization tool with a political component (Islam, Christianity, Scientology). The difference is bound up in whether the institution seeks political power, and whether it spreads. It's the difference between two little girls with a lemonade stand going through the motions of trade, and General Electric. Yes, both are businesses, of a kind. How useful is it to use the same word to refer to both? Looked at in this way, the period before the spread of Abrahamic religions seems like a theological pre-Cambrian.
The next step is to ask exactly what the word "God" actually means, as Western Christians use it. You'll frequently find that people are completely clueless about the differences between their own sect and others. Then ask people from the same sect to describe the nature of God. Not only will their descriptions contradict each other, they'll likely contradict the basic teachings of their sect on this question. Also interestingly, many religious people shrink from such a question, feeling as if it isn't their place to think about such matters (if you're really serious about your faith, shouldn't you think about such matters every day?) The kinds of answers you will get are Loving, Kind, Vengeful, or the theological CYA that We Can't Understand Him. What we're talking about here lies on a problem-of-reference spectrum. It's somewhere between young children and schizophrenics can tell you all about their imaginary friend's dress and shoes or the physical description of the CIA agent that follows them around, and on the other hand statements like "Romeo and Juliet are Thai". Everyone knows Romeo and Juliet aren't real, so it's okay to give them specific characteristics.
To avoid these philosophical imbroglii, we can think of what God means in behavioral terms – how people observably act when the word is used. From that perspective, for most people who call themselves theists, "God" is a set of sounds with little semantic content, but that signals "I am part of this group, adhere to its values and rituals, and accept the authority of its Scripture and leaders". If you ask people to discuss the nature of their God they generally come up blank, or even say things directly in contradiction to what their religion holds.
Frustrating though this might seem, it's great news for atheists talking to on-the-fence people. An all-out full frontal assault on the very concept of God a) ensures that the shields go up and b) it's not a central concept to most religious people anyway. So focus on the practical benefits of being an atheist. Focus on the things that materialists/rationalists/secularists do to make the world a better place, on the enriching effect of the atheists that you've met since you've "come out", and the fact that they would have (mostly) the same friends if they were to defect. Most of all, focus on how it helps you to be a good person, since this seems to be a big concern for doubting theists. Even if all you do is get them to be a homebody Christian instead of a church-every-Sunday Christian, you'll get them away from their regular reinforcement, and that's an accomplishment.
Crackpot Redux
PZ Myers also posted a link to this great piece by Pascal Boyer about scientific crackpots. Pascal Boyer also wrote the most excellent Religion Explained.
I had written before about my personal experience with crackpots, and some of the more curious quirks that they all seem to share, but Boyer is a genuine crackpot enthusiast and has many more examples to draw from. These cases support his Crackpot Characteristics List, which includes my two favorites "Crackpots ignore other crackpots" and "The crackpot theory is invariably more intuitive than the standard one". The relevance to atheists is that crackpots are a great exhibit of people with a flawed process who have some bizarre similarities to creationists and other sufferers of the Religious Right's pathologies.
I had written before about my personal experience with crackpots, and some of the more curious quirks that they all seem to share, but Boyer is a genuine crackpot enthusiast and has many more examples to draw from. These cases support his Crackpot Characteristics List, which includes my two favorites "Crackpots ignore other crackpots" and "The crackpot theory is invariably more intuitive than the standard one". The relevance to atheists is that crackpots are a great exhibit of people with a flawed process who have some bizarre similarities to creationists and other sufferers of the Religious Right's pathologies.
Shout Out to the Friendly Atheist
I've been tardy in thanking Hemant on my blog for his plug. If you have the chance to get to one of his talks, do it. And read his awesome blog.
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
This is the Awesomest Afterlife Ever
Even better than the Flying Spaghetti Monster's beer volcano. Really! If the author of the piece is to be taken at face value, people really believed in it for centuries too. The writer of the article asks why this one is any sillier than 72 virgins or playing a harp in the stratosphere.
But if I'm going to talk my wife into the implications of the article, I better stop insulting her character on my blog.
But if I'm going to talk my wife into the implications of the article, I better stop insulting her character on my blog.
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Atheist Political Issues
I keep talking about how atheism is really a political more than a philosophical question, so it's about time I compile a list of the issues that motivate most atheists. Am I missing any? Are there any on that you don't think should be there?
- Separation of church and state (the rest of these largely fall out of this one)
- Prayer in schools
- Creationism in schools
- Censorship
- Herbal and religious medical quackery
- Stem cell research
- Abuse of women and children (sexual, medical, brainwashing)
- Euthanasia
- Equal rights for LGBT (including marriage)
- Animal research
- Drug legalization
- Abortion
- Birth control
- Sex education
- Special treatment for religious organizations (taxation and transparency of ministries)
- Separation of church and state (the rest of these largely fall out of this one)
- Prayer in schools
- Creationism in schools
- Censorship
- Herbal and religious medical quackery
- Stem cell research
- Abuse of women and children (sexual, medical, brainwashing)
- Euthanasia
- Equal rights for LGBT (including marriage)
- Animal research
- Drug legalization
- Abortion
- Birth control
- Sex education
- Special treatment for religious organizations (taxation and transparency of ministries)
Faith and Trade
It's links like this that make Marginal Revolution the best economics blog ever: it does restore some of my confidence in humans that Muslims and Jews can at least work together to devise a work-around for some of their religions' sillier points (why they don't just toss them altogether is another question). The intersection of religion, reason and trade is always an interesting topic.
Is There a Cross on Public Land in Your Town?
San Francisco has many hills, and the highest of them - Mt. Davidson - hosts a large cross. While Mt. Davidson is a public park, the spot of land the cross stands on was given to a private organization, with the obvious intention of gaming the system and keeping the cross standing where it was. For years prominent Bay Area atheist Dave Kong fought to have it removed, but despite his efforts, the case was eventually turned down.
It's not the first time it's happened in California. Mt. Soledad in San Diego is the home of another big old cross on a hill. Despite that it is on unambiguously Federal land, and the efforts of a local attorney working pro bono with the ACLU, it was ruled that it could stay. I had personally looked into the legality of the cross on top of Albany Hill in the East Bay (near San Francisco), but it's on a slice of private land, and I saw how Ray Kong's case went.
Of course these cases aren't just in California. There's a controversy just starting in my hometown. There's a cross that's been lit up on the side of a tower at Easter for fifty years - but getting used to something doesn't
Now my hometown of Reading, Pennsylvania is having its own cross-on-the-hill-controversy. One of the main arguments is that we pro-separation people should just relax, and the cross isn't a big deal - so I've been asking people back home if they would be as accepting if the city put up a big stone Qu'ran with their tax dollars. But these are tough fights to fight, and they've happened before, and we're sometimes successful. So let's pay attention to what's happening elsewhere in the country and take advantage of history.
It's not the first time it's happened in California. Mt. Soledad in San Diego is the home of another big old cross on a hill. Despite that it is on unambiguously Federal land, and the efforts of a local attorney working pro bono with the ACLU, it was ruled that it could stay. I had personally looked into the legality of the cross on top of Albany Hill in the East Bay (near San Francisco), but it's on a slice of private land, and I saw how Ray Kong's case went.
Of course these cases aren't just in California. There's a controversy just starting in my hometown. There's a cross that's been lit up on the side of a tower at Easter for fifty years - but getting used to something doesn't
Now my hometown of Reading, Pennsylvania is having its own cross-on-the-hill-controversy. One of the main arguments is that we pro-separation people should just relax, and the cross isn't a big deal - so I've been asking people back home if they would be as accepting if the city put up a big stone Qu'ran with their tax dollars. But these are tough fights to fight, and they've happened before, and we're sometimes successful. So let's pay attention to what's happening elsewhere in the country and take advantage of history.
Sunday, April 5, 2009
If You Live in Iowa, En Garde
Sincere congratulations to the people of Iowa, who now enjoy a freedom that people in my state of California do not. You have a good comeback for LA-types who make "fly-over state" comments. (Of course San Franciscans would never say such things.)
Judges exist to interpret laws according to the constitution. Of course, the R.R. (Religious Right) doesn't appreciate the rule of secular law, so when something doesn't go their way, they issue press releases about "legislating from the bench" and then put measures on the ballot that (for example) define marriage as between a man and a woman. Unfortunately the public doesn't always understand, and the R.R. willfully ignores, that civil rights are not subject to a vote. But this is exactly what happened in California, and it worked. If this worked in California, it will probably work in the Midwest.
The good news is that in Iowa, two consecutive legislatures have to ratify such a ballot measure before it appears on a ballot. California has no such controls. Consequently, this year won't be the year for Iowa's Prop 8 - because both houses are controlled by the Democrats. I can't imagine it will be easier to get people riled up about this next year, or the year after that.
It bears repeating that over here in California, we reacted to our own anti-gay marriage ballot measure with complacency. Walking around San Francisco, it's very easy to tell yourself "So what if it's on the ballot? Everybody I know" (in San Francisco!) "is for gay marriage anyway." The organizers, and a huge amount of the money, behind Prop 8 came from outside the state. And you saw what happened.
So, Iowans, pay very, very close attention to what the R.R. is doing regarding gay marriage in Iowa over the next two years. It seems they can't get on the ballot soon, but they're not going to take this lying down. See the last three bullet points in this article.
Judges exist to interpret laws according to the constitution. Of course, the R.R. (Religious Right) doesn't appreciate the rule of secular law, so when something doesn't go their way, they issue press releases about "legislating from the bench" and then put measures on the ballot that (for example) define marriage as between a man and a woman. Unfortunately the public doesn't always understand, and the R.R. willfully ignores, that civil rights are not subject to a vote. But this is exactly what happened in California, and it worked. If this worked in California, it will probably work in the Midwest.
The good news is that in Iowa, two consecutive legislatures have to ratify such a ballot measure before it appears on a ballot. California has no such controls. Consequently, this year won't be the year for Iowa's Prop 8 - because both houses are controlled by the Democrats. I can't imagine it will be easier to get people riled up about this next year, or the year after that.
It bears repeating that over here in California, we reacted to our own anti-gay marriage ballot measure with complacency. Walking around San Francisco, it's very easy to tell yourself "So what if it's on the ballot? Everybody I know" (in San Francisco!) "is for gay marriage anyway." The organizers, and a huge amount of the money, behind Prop 8 came from outside the state. And you saw what happened.
So, Iowans, pay very, very close attention to what the R.R. is doing regarding gay marriage in Iowa over the next two years. It seems they can't get on the ballot soon, but they're not going to take this lying down. See the last three bullet points in this article.
I Was Tricked!
By that Jezebel wife of mine. Friday night she set a little Hershey bar in front of me while I was working away at my computer. Because she and I have had little red meat-avoiding contests in the past (and she tricked me in those too) I should've been suspicious. After I ate the chocolate she put another one down. At that point I vaguely sensed that I should not, and refused for a reason I still didn't remember. Of course, that reason is that I gave up chocolate just in my previous post. Gah! So now I have to extend my atheist Yomkippurmadan another two days, to May 3rd. I won't let you down again!
In fairness to me, putting a piece of chocolate in front of me is like giving a seed to a bird. It is mere reflex to crack it open. Which is exactly why I'm having atheist Lent-Kippur.
In fairness to me, putting a piece of chocolate in front of me is like giving a seed to a bird. It is mere reflex to crack it open. Which is exactly why I'm having atheist Lent-Kippur.
Friday, April 3, 2009
How to Build a Successful Atheist Group
Parenting Beyond Belief has a great post about how to run a successful secular/humanist/atheist/Brights/etc. group, from someone with experience at a lot of them.
I've compared religion to professional sports before; I'm not a pro-football fan, so on Superbowl Sunday I don't host an anti-Superbowl party, I go out kayaking (usually). Of course, the difference is there's no lobbying group trying to teach the gospel of Joe Montana to our first-graders in public school. But we're still left with the problem of making an atheist group something more than an anti-Superbowl party.
That's why my only quibble with this list is that #7, "A Call to Action" should be #1. We gain coherence, community and purpose by organizing toward the specific issues that motivate us as atheists. Make it as local and concrete as you can. A big area is politics - bioethics (stem cell research and euthanasia), school issues like creationism and prayer, public displays of religion, and gay civil rights. Name names of politicians and bills. Cite historical examples of what's worked or not worked in the past. Public awareness and relations works too, and then the volunteer opportunities present themselves. Volunteer to maintain trails or restore creeks or build houses.
Our first problem as atheists is a political one, not a philosophical one, so get involved and make it work.
I've compared religion to professional sports before; I'm not a pro-football fan, so on Superbowl Sunday I don't host an anti-Superbowl party, I go out kayaking (usually). Of course, the difference is there's no lobbying group trying to teach the gospel of Joe Montana to our first-graders in public school. But we're still left with the problem of making an atheist group something more than an anti-Superbowl party.
That's why my only quibble with this list is that #7, "A Call to Action" should be #1. We gain coherence, community and purpose by organizing toward the specific issues that motivate us as atheists. Make it as local and concrete as you can. A big area is politics - bioethics (stem cell research and euthanasia), school issues like creationism and prayer, public displays of religion, and gay civil rights. Name names of politicians and bills. Cite historical examples of what's worked or not worked in the past. Public awareness and relations works too, and then the volunteer opportunities present themselves. Volunteer to maintain trails or restore creeks or build houses.
Our first problem as atheists is a political one, not a philosophical one, so get involved and make it work.
"Nothing But Old-Fashioned Censorship"
When I started reading this article by Christopher Hitchens about governments' new enthusiasm for banning public figures from their countries, I was sure he would mention Oklahoma's (failed) attempt to do so to Richard Dawkins. But he doesn't. Maybe he's letting the audience connect the dots.
Crybabies at CAIR
Another attack on freedom of speech. The Council for American Islamic Relations is upset that radio hosts at KSFO said bad things about Islam. Two important points here: boo hoo, and awwww. It's 2009 CAIR, and no one has a right to never be offended. Get over it. I will be buying from KSFO's sponsors now.
Thursday, April 2, 2009
Hemant Mehta's Talk at Berkeley
Hemant Mehta came to UC Berkeley yesterday to give a talk to the Berkeley Students for A Nonreligious Ethos. Yes, the Lucky Atheist met the Friendly Atheist! Great talk, really glad to meet him in person, really glad to meet some of the people in a university atheist group, plus we all went out afterwards for pizza and good discussion.
One thing that stuck with me was Hemant's experiences with moderate religious people and organizations. He emphasized that shock-value atheists aren't helping matters, and if atheist groups and Christian groups at universities are using their unique relationships to (in at least one case) build houses together, so much the better. Over the long-term we get more deverts by being good examples of how atheism is a better way to live.
So, I'm going to start an AGD (Atheist Good Deeds) series. This could be anything from donating time to personal improvement, like breaking bad habits. I'm going to do both in April. I'm going to get the kid I've been mentoring since 2001 to finish his GED exams, and I'm going to give up chocolate for the whole month. (Atheist Lentmadan, I guess.) What will you do?
One thing that stuck with me was Hemant's experiences with moderate religious people and organizations. He emphasized that shock-value atheists aren't helping matters, and if atheist groups and Christian groups at universities are using their unique relationships to (in at least one case) build houses together, so much the better. Over the long-term we get more deverts by being good examples of how atheism is a better way to live.
So, I'm going to start an AGD (Atheist Good Deeds) series. This could be anything from donating time to personal improvement, like breaking bad habits. I'm going to do both in April. I'm going to get the kid I've been mentoring since 2001 to finish his GED exams, and I'm going to give up chocolate for the whole month. (Atheist Lentmadan, I guess.) What will you do?
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Academic Freedom For Astronomers
A bunch of smarty-pants astronomers decided to calculate the time variation of pi throughout human history, but left out the true value of 3.00, found in 1 Kings 7:23. Academic freedom! Teach the controversy!
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
I'm Going Over To Youtube Tomorrow
(Update: Randi himself graciously clarified that the suspension was due to an inadvertent copyright violation, not due to a conspiracy of woo. So I didn't go over to Youtube - but the world can see just how vocal and connected we rationalists have become).
Physically. As a disappointed user, with your comments or complaints about the James Randi Educational Foundation suspension printed out in a neat folder. Leave your comments below, and I will deliver them after noon Pacific time on Wednesday 1 April (and that's no joke). Include comments about the issues with Rational Response and Pat Condell's and Thunderf00t's videos too. I plan to emphasize that Youtube's user experience is deteriorating (that's what they care about) because they let special interests control access to content with the equivalent of organized letter-writing campaigns. Maybe a physical visit will do more than letters and emails.
Physically. As a disappointed user, with your comments or complaints about the James Randi Educational Foundation suspension printed out in a neat folder. Leave your comments below, and I will deliver them after noon Pacific time on Wednesday 1 April (and that's no joke). Include comments about the issues with Rational Response and Pat Condell's and Thunderf00t's videos too. I plan to emphasize that Youtube's user experience is deteriorating (that's what they care about) because they let special interests control access to content with the equivalent of organized letter-writing campaigns. Maybe a physical visit will do more than letters and emails.
Monday, March 30, 2009
Conform. Obey.
Have you ever seen John Carpenter's They Live? If so you can skip the description and the clip. If not, quick background: aliens are taking over the Earth using subliminal messages hidden in advertising and mass media, but if you put on special sunglasses, you can see through the disguise. Never mind the 80s hair - the idea is still pretty cool (starts in earnest around 1:10).
What I really like is the connection the underlying message shows to the advertising or object masking it; or sometimes, what seems to be varied text and graphics is really just a set of the same subliminal commands repeated again and again. The sexy Caribbean vacation ad actually says Marry and reproduce. Paper money says This is your god. The pages of business publications have graphs and charts and paragraphs but in reality each page drones Conform. Obey. Conform. Obey.
You're reading this on an atheist blog. Have you guessed where this is going?
I've had They Live on my mind because a friend sent me the infamous bubblegum clip recently, and tonight I used the parking lot of a church as a turn around. While circling the lot I looked up to see plastic letters proclaiming to the world: "Faith is letting your soul see what your eyes cannot". With my rational sunglasses I saw Suspend your critical faculties so that you can be cajoled into believing patently ludicrous claims. Sometimes the Christian/alien overlords forget to turn the subliminal filter on and you don't even need the glasses.
Every time atheists see religious media, I think we translate it to the underlying subliminal message on some level. But now let's start playing the Critical-Thinking-Sunglasses game consciously and explicitly with religious media. It's a great game - spices up any drive to work! Fun for road trips! Fun for the whole family!
What I really like is the connection the underlying message shows to the advertising or object masking it; or sometimes, what seems to be varied text and graphics is really just a set of the same subliminal commands repeated again and again. The sexy Caribbean vacation ad actually says Marry and reproduce. Paper money says This is your god. The pages of business publications have graphs and charts and paragraphs but in reality each page drones Conform. Obey. Conform. Obey.
You're reading this on an atheist blog. Have you guessed where this is going?
I've had They Live on my mind because a friend sent me the infamous bubblegum clip recently, and tonight I used the parking lot of a church as a turn around. While circling the lot I looked up to see plastic letters proclaiming to the world: "Faith is letting your soul see what your eyes cannot". With my rational sunglasses I saw Suspend your critical faculties so that you can be cajoled into believing patently ludicrous claims. Sometimes the Christian/alien overlords forget to turn the subliminal filter on and you don't even need the glasses.
Every time atheists see religious media, I think we translate it to the underlying subliminal message on some level. But now let's start playing the Critical-Thinking-Sunglasses game consciously and explicitly with religious media. It's a great game - spices up any drive to work! Fun for road trips! Fun for the whole family!
Thursday, March 26, 2009
"It Was Just Born There!"
You remember those Twinkie commercials? (At least I think they were Twinkies.) They went around to the little kids on a playground and asked them all how the cream got inside a Twinkie, and one of them throws up his hands and said "It was just born there!" and everyone goes "Awwwww." Only problem is, grown-ups say this too. When grown-ups say it, whether they're talking about geology, biology or astronomy, it's not so cute. Especially not when they threaten you with violence for not agreeing that "it was just born there".
Every theological argument for how the world works translates to "it was just born there", also popularly translated by our community as "godidit". While these heroic efforts to fight off comprehension are frustrating, it does immediately slant the game in favor of rationalists, even rhetorically. Chiefly among our advantages: pretend-science arguments that are really religious discovery-obstruction in disguise (like intelligent design) never have any facts or findings of their own to show, and oddly, when they get their own documentary, instead of sharing the fantastic discoveries of their discipline with the world, they take ninety minutes to rant about the conspiracy against them (UFO nuts are oddly similar). Related to this is the dearth of inventions. Why, if their "theory" (be it based on the Bible or L. Ron Hubbard) is so great, are they outnumbered by a healthy margin (score: all to zero) in patents and applied knowledge that lead to cures and profits?
As someone once pointed out to me, if Christianity, or Islam or any of the rest of them, are in any meaningful sense true, eventually we'll discover that - it'll just take us a little longer. So why the fuss? Why are these people not only insisting that "it was just born there", but trying to keep the rest of us from finding out and teaching what we've found to show that it wasn't just born there. Whether it's why the stars move the way they do, how the brain works, where animals came from or how the Earth formed, they'd rather stop the questioning before it gets too serious. But I really like Twinkies, and I really want to know how the cream gets in there for real. And then I'll like them even more.
Every theological argument for how the world works translates to "it was just born there", also popularly translated by our community as "godidit". While these heroic efforts to fight off comprehension are frustrating, it does immediately slant the game in favor of rationalists, even rhetorically. Chiefly among our advantages: pretend-science arguments that are really religious discovery-obstruction in disguise (like intelligent design) never have any facts or findings of their own to show, and oddly, when they get their own documentary, instead of sharing the fantastic discoveries of their discipline with the world, they take ninety minutes to rant about the conspiracy against them (UFO nuts are oddly similar). Related to this is the dearth of inventions. Why, if their "theory" (be it based on the Bible or L. Ron Hubbard) is so great, are they outnumbered by a healthy margin (score: all to zero) in patents and applied knowledge that lead to cures and profits?
As someone once pointed out to me, if Christianity, or Islam or any of the rest of them, are in any meaningful sense true, eventually we'll discover that - it'll just take us a little longer. So why the fuss? Why are these people not only insisting that "it was just born there", but trying to keep the rest of us from finding out and teaching what we've found to show that it wasn't just born there. Whether it's why the stars move the way they do, how the brain works, where animals came from or how the Earth formed, they'd rather stop the questioning before it gets too serious. But I really like Twinkies, and I really want to know how the cream gets in there for real. And then I'll like them even more.
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Sign up For the Secular Summer Camp!
The Camp Quest West March newsletter is out. Promised in this newsletter:
Registration Update
Win a Free Trip to Camp
Local Camp Fair Update - Dragons Rule!
Staffing Update
New Evolution Game
Spring Puzzle
Camp Director's Corner
I highly recommend that you get involved with one of the six Camp Quests around the U.S., either as a counselor, a volunteer, or sending your kids there for a great week. I was a counselor at Camp Quest West in 2006 and it was fantastic.
Camp Quest - it's Beyond Belief!
Registration Update
Win a Free Trip to Camp
Local Camp Fair Update - Dragons Rule!
Staffing Update
New Evolution Game
Spring Puzzle
Camp Director's Corner
I highly recommend that you get involved with one of the six Camp Quests around the U.S., either as a counselor, a volunteer, or sending your kids there for a great week. I was a counselor at Camp Quest West in 2006 and it was fantastic.
Camp Quest - it's Beyond Belief!
Monday, March 23, 2009
The Unlikely Disciple, and Poor Customer Retention
Kevin Roose recently published a book (The Unlikely Disciple) about his "undercover" experience at Liberty University. It's making a big splash - PZ Myers posted about it, and Hemant at Friendly Atheist read it and loved it. One immediate point of demographic interest on the unsuccessful conversion attempts that Roose witnessed is that America does not seem to be the overwhelmingly Christian nation the evangelists try to convince the rest of us that it is. But a more interesting question that Roose raises is that of post-conversion behavior. Once the declaration of salvation is made, there's no follow-up. How do the evangelists know the conversion is anything but words?
They don't, and I would guess that usually it is: the judge in Mark Twain's Huck Finn said he reckoned the only way to reform someone was with a shotgun. Reading about Roose's experience prompted me to wonder why atheists (myself included) are so hesitant to say certain words, like "I accept Jesus into my heart and I'm a sinner". Don't worry, I'm not retropostate like the raving theist - I'm just pointing out that centuries of religion-centric thinking has left even many atheists thinking unconsciously that there are, in fact, magic words that have special powers. Why not repeat such phrases and then do the opposite, precisely in order to render them obviously meaningless? As soon as I learned that the punishment for apostasy in Islam is death, my next two sentences were "I submit to the will of Allah. I reject the Qu'ran and the will of Allah." And now I'm posting it right on my blog. Childish? No more than Robert Ingersoll's challenge to God to strike him dead. It shows that nothing bad happened, either from a lightning bolt or a person.
On that note, I wholly agree that by superficially accepting a deity, you don't want to encourage evangelists and make them think there are more receptive people out there than there actually are (as I worry about here). On the other hand, what do we have to be afraid of if we make a point of show how powerless these "conversions" are? There are no magic words! So say them, as long as you can get something material out of the deal, and can show the evangelists that the words are powerless. For example, Roose mentions gastro-evangelists, who give out food or drinks to start the conversion conversation. Say you encounter some of these blokes handing out diet Cokes. Fine! In that case I say to them, "Sure I take the Lord Jesus into my heart! Let's get this sinner's prayer over with so I can get my Coke." Balance sheet: 2 minutes lost enduring babbling, but I'm no longer thirsty. Come on, tell me you've never been at the grocery store and taken a free morsel of cheese on a toothpick with absolutely no intention of ever buying any cheese. The cheesemakers know that this is a risk when promoting their product. And in fact you're even more justified doing this to gastro-evangelists, because the cheesemaker isn't spreading harmful untruths.
Of course, there's the argument that acting insincerely like this, you're being immoral; that as atheists, more than anybody we have to take the moral high ground to explode the myth of the immoral atheist.
But it's not clear to me that this is immoral. So now I challenge you, fellow atheists, with an invisible pink unicorn analogy. Imagine someone is standing on a street corner and as you walk by they say "There are invisible pink unicorns in this city, and at 6pm today they're going to stampede. They'll run over everyone who hasn't said the magic words. We're trying to save people from this horrible fate! So I'll give you a hamburger if you say the following magic words: Dazza laduzza ladimba." Why is it immoral to insincerely say the words, take the hamburger, and say "so long sucker"?
They don't, and I would guess that usually it is: the judge in Mark Twain's Huck Finn said he reckoned the only way to reform someone was with a shotgun. Reading about Roose's experience prompted me to wonder why atheists (myself included) are so hesitant to say certain words, like "I accept Jesus into my heart and I'm a sinner". Don't worry, I'm not retropostate like the raving theist - I'm just pointing out that centuries of religion-centric thinking has left even many atheists thinking unconsciously that there are, in fact, magic words that have special powers. Why not repeat such phrases and then do the opposite, precisely in order to render them obviously meaningless? As soon as I learned that the punishment for apostasy in Islam is death, my next two sentences were "I submit to the will of Allah. I reject the Qu'ran and the will of Allah." And now I'm posting it right on my blog. Childish? No more than Robert Ingersoll's challenge to God to strike him dead. It shows that nothing bad happened, either from a lightning bolt or a person.
On that note, I wholly agree that by superficially accepting a deity, you don't want to encourage evangelists and make them think there are more receptive people out there than there actually are (as I worry about here). On the other hand, what do we have to be afraid of if we make a point of show how powerless these "conversions" are? There are no magic words! So say them, as long as you can get something material out of the deal, and can show the evangelists that the words are powerless. For example, Roose mentions gastro-evangelists, who give out food or drinks to start the conversion conversation. Say you encounter some of these blokes handing out diet Cokes. Fine! In that case I say to them, "Sure I take the Lord Jesus into my heart! Let's get this sinner's prayer over with so I can get my Coke." Balance sheet: 2 minutes lost enduring babbling, but I'm no longer thirsty. Come on, tell me you've never been at the grocery store and taken a free morsel of cheese on a toothpick with absolutely no intention of ever buying any cheese. The cheesemakers know that this is a risk when promoting their product. And in fact you're even more justified doing this to gastro-evangelists, because the cheesemaker isn't spreading harmful untruths.
Of course, there's the argument that acting insincerely like this, you're being immoral; that as atheists, more than anybody we have to take the moral high ground to explode the myth of the immoral atheist.
But it's not clear to me that this is immoral. So now I challenge you, fellow atheists, with an invisible pink unicorn analogy. Imagine someone is standing on a street corner and as you walk by they say "There are invisible pink unicorns in this city, and at 6pm today they're going to stampede. They'll run over everyone who hasn't said the magic words. We're trying to save people from this horrible fate! So I'll give you a hamburger if you say the following magic words: Dazza laduzza ladimba." Why is it immoral to insincerely say the words, take the hamburger, and say "so long sucker"?
Friday, March 20, 2009
On the Origin of Deities
To make a point to a friend, I had to search the Bible for references to Baal to prove that yes, he's in there, and then it hit me: we frequently talk to theists about whether they consider other gods to have any reality, and how these theists process that people of other religions believe just as sincerely in their own gods as Christians do in theirs. So I began to wonder - how often does the Bible mention other gods? Do the stories recognize the other gods as having sincere followers? Do we recognize the names of these other deities today, or are they the Betamax or dinosaurs of the divinity world?
Originally I was going to make a catalog of gods in the Bible, and look at whether they were still alive (incorporated as subordinated supernatural beings within some branch of the Abrahamic tradition) or extinct and therefore completely alien. Such a project would be time-consuming. If you can point me to a resource compiling this information, by all means comment below. Baal gets multiple mentions, and the Ashtars come up a couple times; Nibhaz and Tartak are mentioned as Elamite gods, and Adrammelech and Anammelech are named but unknown outside the Bible. But if I were to make an exhaustive search, this wouldn't even be the beginning. Mentions of "gods", as in multiple foreign false gods, are legion. So apparently the writers of the Bible, both the Old and New Testaments, did recognize that other people believed sincerely in their gods, even if their gods were false - as Jeremiah famously decried of the degenerate people of his era's Jerusalem.
That false gods, as ideas, can be handed down over the generations should be uncontroversial, even to theists - unless (for example) a Christian is willing to deny that Muslims exist. The descent - and extinction - of deities themselves can be traced like languages or species, although gods and words are much less constrained than genes, because the first two are analog transmission processes, and they allow much more lateral transfer. That is to say, when I go for a run in the northern California forest, I don't have to worry about inhaling redwood or banana slug DNA and growing bark or eyestalks; but in cultural transmission, it happens all the time. Word borrowing doesn't seem odd at all - you can sleep on a futon in English and eat a hambaagaa in Japanese. But more interesting is that here we are in an Indo-European culture, with most of us worshipping a Semitic god, while people in East Asia worship a blue-eyed Indo-European. Go figure! But the world is small, history is short, and coincidence piles up quickly.
Even inundated with the inevitable noise of the world, you can (to a first approximation) show that genes, languages and religions tend to stay together in the same groups of people. People from the same language family tend to be genetically related and follow the same customs as other people from that language family. Of course, this was much more true before 1500 when immigration from Europe to the New World began. But the common descent of deities and languages first struck me while watching a movie at the Banff Mountain Film Festival. A French camera crew followed nomads on their annual migration into the Ennedi Massif, a mountainous oasis in the middle of the Sahara. The nomads were (in language family terms) Afro-Asiatic speakers, a family that also includes Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic.
Upon leading the camera crew into the steep, narrow canyons of the oasis, the nomads warned the Frenchmen to watch out for the baboons, rare in the open desert, that scrambled furtively along the rock ledges around them. Their story about the baboons was that long ago, in the very first family in the world, one brother killed another, and was exiled to this land, where he and his descendants became these apes. Note that these nomads were non-Muslim animists. Given that they're in the same language family as the ancient Hebrews, then if that's not a pre-literate version of the Cain and Abel story, I don't know what is. After all, if the stories of the Old Testament are really that old, at one time they must have been Hebrew oral tradition, handed down over generations.
Asking about the preliterate myths that ended up being written down in the Old Testament naturally leads to other questions. Who were these other deities of what must have undoubtedly been at one time a polytheistic religion, and where are they today? I wrote a post in response to Richard Dawkins' assertion that Hinduism is monotheism in disguise. He's wrong - it's not - and in fact I think a stronger argument could be made that Christianity isn't monotheistic either, my argument being Holy Mary, Mother of God, the Lord is With thee. Even if you're a non-Catholic Christian, step back and look at the profiles of angels in the Bible as if you're studying the religion of a Siberian shaman, and try tell me honestly that you wouldn't use the term "gods" or "minor gods" to describe them - they're supernatural beings within the same hierarchical system. Of course, the fact remains that there is still clearly a difference between the structure of Christianity and Hinduism. The difference is organization and political power, the certain true aim of engineered religions born in the clear light of history. It is perhaps not a coincidence that the most aggressively evangelical ones are also the most monotheistic ones.
In my Dawkins-inspired discussion of Hinduism, I applied Max Muller's concept of henotheism to Hinduism and to the pre-monotheist Hebrew pantheon. And where those other deities are today is either demoted by CEO Yahweh to Senior VP positions like Gabriel, Michael, and lots of other guys with names ending in "-el" - or turned into enemies, like Satan and Baal, the latter being probably more famous to us from Roman anti-Carthage propaganda efforts than from the Bible. To think of henotheism transitioning to monotheism in sports terms: imagine that next year, the New York Yankees roster changes from a list of players to only one real player (A-Rod who art in Heaven) plus a bunch of advanced batboys who are still occasionally allowed on the field during play. The idea of polytheistic Semites is not new, and in fact is strongly suggested by certain words used in the Old Testament, like the plural Hebrew word for gods (Elohim). It's perhaps not surprising that Christian and Jewish Biblical scholars go through some pretty odd contortions to explain away this incongruous plural usage, but right there it is, as the third word of the Bible: "Bereishit bara elohim..." (Literally in order, "At head, filled gods..." In better English, "In the beginning, the gods created..." Note that in Biblical Hebrew verbs came before subjects; VSO structure was common in Semitic languages until the Middle Ages.
The question of exactly how we innocent Indo-Europeans got dragged into a Semitic religion is an interesting one, and the single player probably most responsible is Paul. I think of Paul as an early marketing consultant, for reasons which become clear. Paul is seen by some Biblical scholars (like F.C. Baur) to have been in strong opposition against the less Hellenistic (read: bumpkin) apostles who preceeded him. All Biblical scholars concede he never met Christ, but he has his little epiphany on the way to Damascus (or says he does), and suddenly he's designed the whole marketing plan for early Christianity! (Here's an analogy: if Christ was Marx, Peter was Lenin, Paul was Stalin and, stretching it, Arius was Trotsky. That's a freebie for the Hitch.) Paul visited multiple cities in his evangelism and wrote 13 of the 27 books of the New Testament, including 9 letters to his churches he founded or visited in Indo-European regions - you know, all of those books with the name of a nationality (Ephesians, Thessalonians, Romans, Galatians, you name it). A former legal official skilled in rhetoric (unsurprising after three centuries of Hellenization in the Near East), in each case Paul tailors his message to the pre-existing notions of that particular nation. That is to say, he frames his argument.
One concept that Paul uses in these letters which sticks out noticeably is that of the Trinity. It sticks out because it recurs in his writing to these people; because all these people were Indo-European, unlike himself; and because the Trinity is something that Christ is never recorded in the Bible to have discussed. (WWJD?) Why is it relevant that Paul was dealing with Indo-Europeans? Indo-European native religions all have a triumvirate of gods: Jupiter-Neptune-Pluto, Zeus-Poseidon-Hades, Vishnu-Brahma-Shiva (the only surviving one), and Odin-Thor-Loki (although it was Tyr that's cognate with Jupiter). To assert a common ancestry is not my personal flaky theory - the mutation of the names from a common starting point has been rigorously reconstructed in gory detail by Indo-Europeanists, but the point is that all these gods almost certainly descend, in a very literal cultural sense, from the same sky-sea-earth gods that a tribe of people were worshipping six thousand years ago on the plains north of the Black Sea. Pretty cool! That's why today we have a Semitic religion with an Indo-European flavor - syncretism, just like Aztec rituals incorporated into Mexican Catholic ceremonies, without the Mexican Catholics realizing it themselves. Have you ever seen a Day of the Dead parade in Madrid? It's not like the ones in Mexico, to say the least.
Abrahamic theists may not accept that his or her god is the sole survivor of a polytheistic Hebrew pantheon. But the Bible clearly recognizes that other gods existed, and that people were running around worshipping them in earnest. This raises my final questions: if there is only one real god, why did it take so long for somebody to discover him? And if Abraham was the first to find a real god, where did everyone before him get the idea of gods in the first place?
Originally I was going to make a catalog of gods in the Bible, and look at whether they were still alive (incorporated as subordinated supernatural beings within some branch of the Abrahamic tradition) or extinct and therefore completely alien. Such a project would be time-consuming. If you can point me to a resource compiling this information, by all means comment below. Baal gets multiple mentions, and the Ashtars come up a couple times; Nibhaz and Tartak are mentioned as Elamite gods, and Adrammelech and Anammelech are named but unknown outside the Bible. But if I were to make an exhaustive search, this wouldn't even be the beginning. Mentions of "gods", as in multiple foreign false gods, are legion. So apparently the writers of the Bible, both the Old and New Testaments, did recognize that other people believed sincerely in their gods, even if their gods were false - as Jeremiah famously decried of the degenerate people of his era's Jerusalem.
That false gods, as ideas, can be handed down over the generations should be uncontroversial, even to theists - unless (for example) a Christian is willing to deny that Muslims exist. The descent - and extinction - of deities themselves can be traced like languages or species, although gods and words are much less constrained than genes, because the first two are analog transmission processes, and they allow much more lateral transfer. That is to say, when I go for a run in the northern California forest, I don't have to worry about inhaling redwood or banana slug DNA and growing bark or eyestalks; but in cultural transmission, it happens all the time. Word borrowing doesn't seem odd at all - you can sleep on a futon in English and eat a hambaagaa in Japanese. But more interesting is that here we are in an Indo-European culture, with most of us worshipping a Semitic god, while people in East Asia worship a blue-eyed Indo-European. Go figure! But the world is small, history is short, and coincidence piles up quickly.
 |
| The Buddha. I tried to get a photograph of him showing his blue eyes, but the best I could do was this statue. There aren't many photographs of Lord Gautama because he hated popperazzi; he thought they were too attached to their work. |
Even inundated with the inevitable noise of the world, you can (to a first approximation) show that genes, languages and religions tend to stay together in the same groups of people. People from the same language family tend to be genetically related and follow the same customs as other people from that language family. Of course, this was much more true before 1500 when immigration from Europe to the New World began. But the common descent of deities and languages first struck me while watching a movie at the Banff Mountain Film Festival. A French camera crew followed nomads on their annual migration into the Ennedi Massif, a mountainous oasis in the middle of the Sahara. The nomads were (in language family terms) Afro-Asiatic speakers, a family that also includes Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic.
Upon leading the camera crew into the steep, narrow canyons of the oasis, the nomads warned the Frenchmen to watch out for the baboons, rare in the open desert, that scrambled furtively along the rock ledges around them. Their story about the baboons was that long ago, in the very first family in the world, one brother killed another, and was exiled to this land, where he and his descendants became these apes. Note that these nomads were non-Muslim animists. Given that they're in the same language family as the ancient Hebrews, then if that's not a pre-literate version of the Cain and Abel story, I don't know what is. After all, if the stories of the Old Testament are really that old, at one time they must have been Hebrew oral tradition, handed down over generations.
Asking about the preliterate myths that ended up being written down in the Old Testament naturally leads to other questions. Who were these other deities of what must have undoubtedly been at one time a polytheistic religion, and where are they today? I wrote a post in response to Richard Dawkins' assertion that Hinduism is monotheism in disguise. He's wrong - it's not - and in fact I think a stronger argument could be made that Christianity isn't monotheistic either, my argument being Holy Mary, Mother of God, the Lord is With thee. Even if you're a non-Catholic Christian, step back and look at the profiles of angels in the Bible as if you're studying the religion of a Siberian shaman, and try tell me honestly that you wouldn't use the term "gods" or "minor gods" to describe them - they're supernatural beings within the same hierarchical system. Of course, the fact remains that there is still clearly a difference between the structure of Christianity and Hinduism. The difference is organization and political power, the certain true aim of engineered religions born in the clear light of history. It is perhaps not a coincidence that the most aggressively evangelical ones are also the most monotheistic ones.
In my Dawkins-inspired discussion of Hinduism, I applied Max Muller's concept of henotheism to Hinduism and to the pre-monotheist Hebrew pantheon. And where those other deities are today is either demoted by CEO Yahweh to Senior VP positions like Gabriel, Michael, and lots of other guys with names ending in "-el" - or turned into enemies, like Satan and Baal, the latter being probably more famous to us from Roman anti-Carthage propaganda efforts than from the Bible. To think of henotheism transitioning to monotheism in sports terms: imagine that next year, the New York Yankees roster changes from a list of players to only one real player (A-Rod who art in Heaven) plus a bunch of advanced batboys who are still occasionally allowed on the field during play. The idea of polytheistic Semites is not new, and in fact is strongly suggested by certain words used in the Old Testament, like the plural Hebrew word for gods (Elohim). It's perhaps not surprising that Christian and Jewish Biblical scholars go through some pretty odd contortions to explain away this incongruous plural usage, but right there it is, as the third word of the Bible: "Bereishit bara elohim..." (Literally in order, "At head, filled gods..." In better English, "In the beginning, the gods created..." Note that in Biblical Hebrew verbs came before subjects; VSO structure was common in Semitic languages until the Middle Ages.
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| The Archangel Michael. Come on, try and tell me this guy isn't a god. The name frickin means god-like. | The Indo-European language family tree. |
The question of exactly how we innocent Indo-Europeans got dragged into a Semitic religion is an interesting one, and the single player probably most responsible is Paul. I think of Paul as an early marketing consultant, for reasons which become clear. Paul is seen by some Biblical scholars (like F.C. Baur) to have been in strong opposition against the less Hellenistic (read: bumpkin) apostles who preceeded him. All Biblical scholars concede he never met Christ, but he has his little epiphany on the way to Damascus (or says he does), and suddenly he's designed the whole marketing plan for early Christianity! (Here's an analogy: if Christ was Marx, Peter was Lenin, Paul was Stalin and, stretching it, Arius was Trotsky. That's a freebie for the Hitch.) Paul visited multiple cities in his evangelism and wrote 13 of the 27 books of the New Testament, including 9 letters to his churches he founded or visited in Indo-European regions - you know, all of those books with the name of a nationality (Ephesians, Thessalonians, Romans, Galatians, you name it). A former legal official skilled in rhetoric (unsurprising after three centuries of Hellenization in the Near East), in each case Paul tailors his message to the pre-existing notions of that particular nation. That is to say, he frames his argument.
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| Above left: facial reconstruction of the apostle Paul. Above right: 1911 mugshot of Josef Dzhugashvili (Stalin) as a young man. | Sleazy? Hey, when desperate Christian apologists stop repeating "Hitler was an atheist" over and over again even though they've been corrected, I'll stop putting pictures of their founders next to pictures of murderous dictators. |
One concept that Paul uses in these letters which sticks out noticeably is that of the Trinity. It sticks out because it recurs in his writing to these people; because all these people were Indo-European, unlike himself; and because the Trinity is something that Christ is never recorded in the Bible to have discussed. (WWJD?) Why is it relevant that Paul was dealing with Indo-Europeans? Indo-European native religions all have a triumvirate of gods: Jupiter-Neptune-Pluto, Zeus-Poseidon-Hades, Vishnu-Brahma-Shiva (the only surviving one), and Odin-Thor-Loki (although it was Tyr that's cognate with Jupiter). To assert a common ancestry is not my personal flaky theory - the mutation of the names from a common starting point has been rigorously reconstructed in gory detail by Indo-Europeanists, but the point is that all these gods almost certainly descend, in a very literal cultural sense, from the same sky-sea-earth gods that a tribe of people were worshipping six thousand years ago on the plains north of the Black Sea. Pretty cool! That's why today we have a Semitic religion with an Indo-European flavor - syncretism, just like Aztec rituals incorporated into Mexican Catholic ceremonies, without the Mexican Catholics realizing it themselves. Have you ever seen a Day of the Dead parade in Madrid? It's not like the ones in Mexico, to say the least.
Abrahamic theists may not accept that his or her god is the sole survivor of a polytheistic Hebrew pantheon. But the Bible clearly recognizes that other gods existed, and that people were running around worshipping them in earnest. This raises my final questions: if there is only one real god, why did it take so long for somebody to discover him? And if Abraham was the first to find a real god, where did everyone before him get the idea of gods in the first place?
Atheists in Sports - Eric Walsky
I've said before that professional sports is a kind of bastion of red-meat and apple-pie religious culture in the United States. That's why I was so satisfied to see the elephant in the (locker) room get addressed openly by sports journalists, fed up with preaching quarterbacks around the time of the superbowl.
I was also happy to run across this article about Anchorage native Eric Walsky, a free agent just signed to the Vancouver Canucks hockey team. Walsky is just finishing up at Colorado College. I should add that I assume he's an atheist, based on his thesis, which is written about "atheist identity".
I was also happy to run across this article about Anchorage native Eric Walsky, a free agent just signed to the Vancouver Canucks hockey team. Walsky is just finishing up at Colorado College. I should add that I assume he's an atheist, based on his thesis, which is written about "atheist identity".
The Nine Billion Names of God
There's a great Arthur C. Clark story by that name; you should read it. I was thinking about the story recently, and then I thought about this: does it matter what name you call God?
Of course I don't think it does, because I'm an atheist. But I'm genuinely interested in what a Christian would have to say to this question.
I can imagine arguments using ritual, intention, or linguistics. Let's start with a linguistics experiment. If I changed the Lord's prayer and instead of "Our Lord" I say "Allah", and instead of "amen" I end with "Allah aqbar", does God still receive my prayer? What if I change it to "Elvis" or "Odin", or "Satan"? How does God know when to accept my collect call, so to speak? I concede that I'm putting it in a flippant way, but it's the clearest way of making my point, and I'm genuinely interested in the Christian answer to this.
If saying a different name can affect which account gets the prayer deposit, how about just prononcing it differently? If I say Chesus instead of Jesus, does that make a difference? If Chesus is okay, what about Chesush? I imagine a deity with my prayers approaching at increasingly wide angles until finally - whoops, 3 phonemes different, outside the goal posts! 3 phoneme-strikes and you're out! If the name you use can affect whether the prayers stay on target, what about the name translated to different languages - there are certainly languages whose speakers can't pronounce the name properly for no reason other than the circumstance of their birth - it wasn't my fault I wasn't born speaking Aramaic. And to that end, do you really think you're saying the name "Jesus Christ" the way He said it?
So far I've been assuming that I could do these experiments; but does a "real" Christian (however you define that) have to say a prayer for God to hear it? If so, does that mean God can't hear an atheist's prayers, or just doesn't respond? Does God hear and respond to the prayers of a Muslim, who is praying to a false god with a different name and different characteristics? Maybe there's confusion there because we're still dealing with the god of Abraham; fine. What about in the unambiguously separate ancestry of the Hindu god Shiva, or an Amazon animist's jaguar spirit?
Maybe all these questions about language are irrelevant. So maybe it's intent that matters. In other words, if a Christian with a lot on her mind somehow has a slip of the tongue (as a genuine accident; admittedly unlikely, but for the sake of argument) and says Mohammed instead of Jesus in a prayer, but she meant to say Jesus, does it make a difference?
Finally, I can imagine an explanation of how you know prayer is recognized as such by framing with the appropriate rituals. That is, it's only a prayer if you put your hands together, or do it in a church, or cross yourself, or at least silently address God in your mind. This raises the seemingly smartass but again, sincere question for me as a nonbeliever. Let's say without thinking about it I put my hands together (or do some other part of the ritual that presses SEND on the prayer broadcast) while talking to someone in a business meeting. Would God suddenly hear among his followers' many prayers "at the data from Q306, the Argenomix NDMA antagonist had a horrible safety profi", like when you inadvertently call someone from your car by sitting on your cell phone, and without your realizing it your friend Jenny is treated to you singing along to Megadeth. (Not that this ever happened to me.)
If you're a professing Christian, then there are other questions inherent here. Specifically, what relationship do people within those other religions, who are sincere about those religions and may even explicitly reject Christianity, have with God? The possibilities are: their other gods actually exist (unlikely for a Christian to believe, but I don't know so that's why I want to ask). Or, as has been suggested in earnest, these people are atheists, whether or not they know it. Or, also suggested in earnest, these people are actually Satanists, whether or not they know it. Finally, an interpretation appearing in the Christian world only in the last three centuries is that in fact they do have a relationship with God, although an imperfect one muddled by their attributing inaccurate characteristics to Him through their incorrect religion. For those who believe atheism is a religion - could we fall into this category?
Christian readers, please chime in - I'm genuinely curious what you think. Atheist readers, feel free to ask these to your Christian acquaintances and comment back here.
Of course I don't think it does, because I'm an atheist. But I'm genuinely interested in what a Christian would have to say to this question.
I can imagine arguments using ritual, intention, or linguistics. Let's start with a linguistics experiment. If I changed the Lord's prayer and instead of "Our Lord" I say "Allah", and instead of "amen" I end with "Allah aqbar", does God still receive my prayer? What if I change it to "Elvis" or "Odin", or "Satan"? How does God know when to accept my collect call, so to speak? I concede that I'm putting it in a flippant way, but it's the clearest way of making my point, and I'm genuinely interested in the Christian answer to this.
If saying a different name can affect which account gets the prayer deposit, how about just prononcing it differently? If I say Chesus instead of Jesus, does that make a difference? If Chesus is okay, what about Chesush? I imagine a deity with my prayers approaching at increasingly wide angles until finally - whoops, 3 phonemes different, outside the goal posts! 3 phoneme-strikes and you're out! If the name you use can affect whether the prayers stay on target, what about the name translated to different languages - there are certainly languages whose speakers can't pronounce the name properly for no reason other than the circumstance of their birth - it wasn't my fault I wasn't born speaking Aramaic. And to that end, do you really think you're saying the name "Jesus Christ" the way He said it?
So far I've been assuming that I could do these experiments; but does a "real" Christian (however you define that) have to say a prayer for God to hear it? If so, does that mean God can't hear an atheist's prayers, or just doesn't respond? Does God hear and respond to the prayers of a Muslim, who is praying to a false god with a different name and different characteristics? Maybe there's confusion there because we're still dealing with the god of Abraham; fine. What about in the unambiguously separate ancestry of the Hindu god Shiva, or an Amazon animist's jaguar spirit?
Maybe all these questions about language are irrelevant. So maybe it's intent that matters. In other words, if a Christian with a lot on her mind somehow has a slip of the tongue (as a genuine accident; admittedly unlikely, but for the sake of argument) and says Mohammed instead of Jesus in a prayer, but she meant to say Jesus, does it make a difference?
Finally, I can imagine an explanation of how you know prayer is recognized as such by framing with the appropriate rituals. That is, it's only a prayer if you put your hands together, or do it in a church, or cross yourself, or at least silently address God in your mind. This raises the seemingly smartass but again, sincere question for me as a nonbeliever. Let's say without thinking about it I put my hands together (or do some other part of the ritual that presses SEND on the prayer broadcast) while talking to someone in a business meeting. Would God suddenly hear among his followers' many prayers "at the data from Q306, the Argenomix NDMA antagonist had a horrible safety profi", like when you inadvertently call someone from your car by sitting on your cell phone, and without your realizing it your friend Jenny is treated to you singing along to Megadeth. (Not that this ever happened to me.)
If you're a professing Christian, then there are other questions inherent here. Specifically, what relationship do people within those other religions, who are sincere about those religions and may even explicitly reject Christianity, have with God? The possibilities are: their other gods actually exist (unlikely for a Christian to believe, but I don't know so that's why I want to ask). Or, as has been suggested in earnest, these people are atheists, whether or not they know it. Or, also suggested in earnest, these people are actually Satanists, whether or not they know it. Finally, an interpretation appearing in the Christian world only in the last three centuries is that in fact they do have a relationship with God, although an imperfect one muddled by their attributing inaccurate characteristics to Him through their incorrect religion. For those who believe atheism is a religion - could we fall into this category?
Christian readers, please chime in - I'm genuinely curious what you think. Atheist readers, feel free to ask these to your Christian acquaintances and comment back here.
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Second Generation Atheists, Raise Your Hands
I was doing some dirty websurfing - Conservapedia - when I ran across the article on second generation atheists. It implies that there are few second-generation atheists by claiming that only 1,000 sites are indexed by "second generation atheist" - now there's one more. It's an extension of the tired old you-can't-live-without-God idea, and that the few of us that are produced are unproductive, defective miscreants. They apparently haven't seen the statistics on the near-absence of atheists from the nation's prisons.
Second-generation atheists, time to stand up and be counted. Tell your story! In my case, I'm a distance runner, married, and I've been successful in my career. Now I'm about to go to medical school. Defects? Except for an impatient streak that my wife would be glad to tell you about, and an unhealthy love for Jack-in-the-Box, I don't think I'm such a bad guy. Within a few years the wife and I will be producing two more humans who will, if all goes according to plan, be third generation atheists. My great-great-great grandfather was a backwoods Appalachian minister, and his son was captured in the Civil War and spent time in a Confederate concentration camp. His son was a Western PA coal-miner. His son was an accountant at a lumber yard, who told me he believed in God but thought the Bible was mostly bunk. His son was the first to go to college, the first atheist in the line, a naval officer and a metallurgist. And his son is me. In fact, the family's fortunes in all respects - financially, educationally, health-wise - seem to be growing in exactly inverse proportion to religiousness. Huh.
Hey religious people - we're doing fine out here, and our numbers are growing. Keep telling yourself it's not true if it makes you feel better. Better yet, join the ranks!
Second-generation atheists, time to stand up and be counted. Tell your story! In my case, I'm a distance runner, married, and I've been successful in my career. Now I'm about to go to medical school. Defects? Except for an impatient streak that my wife would be glad to tell you about, and an unhealthy love for Jack-in-the-Box, I don't think I'm such a bad guy. Within a few years the wife and I will be producing two more humans who will, if all goes according to plan, be third generation atheists. My great-great-great grandfather was a backwoods Appalachian minister, and his son was captured in the Civil War and spent time in a Confederate concentration camp. His son was a Western PA coal-miner. His son was an accountant at a lumber yard, who told me he believed in God but thought the Bible was mostly bunk. His son was the first to go to college, the first atheist in the line, a naval officer and a metallurgist. And his son is me. In fact, the family's fortunes in all respects - financially, educationally, health-wise - seem to be growing in exactly inverse proportion to religiousness. Huh.
Hey religious people - we're doing fine out here, and our numbers are growing. Keep telling yourself it's not true if it makes you feel better. Better yet, join the ranks!
Why It's Okay to Sell Junk to Religious People
Over on Pharyngula, PZ Myers posted a link to the hilarious Information Age Prayer, where you can buy prayers online. PZ is clear on his position; even if if it were a joke, he would consider it "evil". I disagree.
For the record, I'm not sure whether it's a joke or not. There's a reason that it's so hard to differentiate POEs and real religious sites (because religion is nonsense). But for the sake of discussion let's assume this is a joke. There are really two moral questions at work here: the social impact of the joke website, and taking advantage of people who we as atheists consider delusional.
Individually speaking, I find the question morally clear cut: there's nothing wrong with this guy selling an online prayer to some person who thinks you can say magic words to invisible spirits in the sky. Yes, your "taking advantage of someone" moral instinct might be kicking in, but let me disabuse you of that with another concrete example: let's say I believe in magic sticks (without evidence, because there's no such thing), and you sell me a stick and tell me it's magic (when you know damn well it's not), but you tell me it is, and I believe that it is (because it's nonsense and there's no way to tell). Did you really just cheat me? Even if you told me you didn't really believe in magic sticks, I'd say well, you're just a stupid magic stick atheist and your soul is lost, so I'll still take it off your hands. In fact an otherwise rational magic stick believer should prefer to deal with magic stick atheists, because magic stick atheists put less value on magic sticks, and they'll sell for less.
What's the bottom line? All trade occurs between parties who have different valuations of the traded items. Sometimes the different valuations are arrived at rationally, sometimes not. For example, for lunch most days, I clearly think it's better to have a bento box than $3.25 in my pocket or I wouldn't make the exchange. The sushi place must think the opposite, or they wouldn't be on the other end of the transaction. Now - is it my responsibility to decide if the sushi manager is delusional in his belief, and protect him from the transaction? And in the previous case, is it your responsibility not to take advantage of my (delusion-based) magic stick fetish? After all, we have to be open to new evidence; maybe I'm right, and you're wrong, and there ARE magic sticks, and you just sold me one for five measly dollars! SUCKER!
Socially, some shades of gray do creep in, but there's a way to redeem yourself. True story: I once drove up to a one-dollar toll road entrance and realized I had no cash. I told this to the lady in the toll both (who happened to be black, a fact disclosed because of its imminent relevance to this account). She told me to pull around to the side parking lot and fill out a form in the office. As I parked and got out to enter the small building, a white man emerged from a side door and before I knew what had happened he'd pressed a dollar into my hand. "F**k the n***er, know what I mean? F**k the n***er." He pointed at the woman in the toll both and walked back inside. It was all over in about five seconds.
I was stunned. Initially I thought that I should go in and throw the money back at the guy and tell him that I don't take kindly to racist asshats existing in the first place, let alone assuming I share their convictions just because I happen to be (mostly) white. But then I thought "I'd rather have that dollar to spend on something useful, like a toll road, than for that idiot to keep it and donate to the KKK or buy some racist tschotschkes," and I went back to the toll booth and paid the lady. You can tell this whole episode still bothers me more than a decade later. What I worry about most is that this guy probably concluded, since I said nothing, that there were kindred racist asshat spirits out there, and was subsequently bolder in his ignorance. I also should have said something to the toll booth lady about her coworker - I would want that, were I in her position - but to avoid social awkwardness (read: out of smallness) I did not.
There's no shade of gray in taking away a few bucks from a politically powerful lobby by exploiting their followers' delusions. That's good. On the other hand, the ironic intentions don't translate into a morally different result from selling the stuff in earnest unless you let your victims in on the joke. By selling woo to wingnuts and not ever telling them it's woo, you're reinforcing bad thinking through commerce, like I may have reinforced Mr. Asshat. Plus, how are you different from any other televangelist then? Consequently, redemption comes from revealing the intention: if that cyberprayer site is a joke and a month from now, the owner sends emails out to all past customers saying "we were a fraud the whole time, and the reason you couldn't tell is because all prayer is nonsense", maybe next time those customers will actually think before spending money on evidenceless claptrap. If it's a joke site but the owner gets too attached to his passive income stream and never says anything, then it's socially immoral, because he's just reinforcing woo.
Where I draw the line with this sort of thing is at mentally ill or retarded people who have basic problems with social function and can't take care of themselves. If a mumbling street person comes up to me and offers me $100 for some aluminum foil to make a hat to keep out the CIA mind lasers, I wouldn't make the transaction, and I would encourage them to get help, however futile that might be (as in the case of, for example, a blog providing rational arguments for not believing in gods - but hey, you tried.)
But, folks, here's the good news. All your frustrated wondering at how religious folks can function in their daily lives, believing in the literal word of Scripture for some things but somehow dividing that from the rest of their behavior so they can keep the lights on and feed themselves - all that puzzlement now pays off. The consequence of successful doublethink: since religious people are capable of taking care of themselves, and are socially functional, it's not your responsibility to protect them from their delusions. So if you can sell them magic sticks, holy water, herbal cures, online prayers, etc. then do it - as long as, sooner rather than later, you go very public with the fact that it was all a sham, and these people should have known better. After all, why should a Christian care if the person behind the prayer site doesn't believe prayer works, and sends out a mass email revealing that it was a big joke? That doesn't change whether or not it really does work - and if there's no way of proving whether the prayer was said and had the intended effect (because it's all woo), then that's the customer's problem. Amen? No. Caveat emptor!
For the record, I'm not sure whether it's a joke or not. There's a reason that it's so hard to differentiate POEs and real religious sites (because religion is nonsense). But for the sake of discussion let's assume this is a joke. There are really two moral questions at work here: the social impact of the joke website, and taking advantage of people who we as atheists consider delusional.
Individually speaking, I find the question morally clear cut: there's nothing wrong with this guy selling an online prayer to some person who thinks you can say magic words to invisible spirits in the sky. Yes, your "taking advantage of someone" moral instinct might be kicking in, but let me disabuse you of that with another concrete example: let's say I believe in magic sticks (without evidence, because there's no such thing), and you sell me a stick and tell me it's magic (when you know damn well it's not), but you tell me it is, and I believe that it is (because it's nonsense and there's no way to tell). Did you really just cheat me? Even if you told me you didn't really believe in magic sticks, I'd say well, you're just a stupid magic stick atheist and your soul is lost, so I'll still take it off your hands. In fact an otherwise rational magic stick believer should prefer to deal with magic stick atheists, because magic stick atheists put less value on magic sticks, and they'll sell for less.
What's the bottom line? All trade occurs between parties who have different valuations of the traded items. Sometimes the different valuations are arrived at rationally, sometimes not. For example, for lunch most days, I clearly think it's better to have a bento box than $3.25 in my pocket or I wouldn't make the exchange. The sushi place must think the opposite, or they wouldn't be on the other end of the transaction. Now - is it my responsibility to decide if the sushi manager is delusional in his belief, and protect him from the transaction? And in the previous case, is it your responsibility not to take advantage of my (delusion-based) magic stick fetish? After all, we have to be open to new evidence; maybe I'm right, and you're wrong, and there ARE magic sticks, and you just sold me one for five measly dollars! SUCKER!
Socially, some shades of gray do creep in, but there's a way to redeem yourself. True story: I once drove up to a one-dollar toll road entrance and realized I had no cash. I told this to the lady in the toll both (who happened to be black, a fact disclosed because of its imminent relevance to this account). She told me to pull around to the side parking lot and fill out a form in the office. As I parked and got out to enter the small building, a white man emerged from a side door and before I knew what had happened he'd pressed a dollar into my hand. "F**k the n***er, know what I mean? F**k the n***er." He pointed at the woman in the toll both and walked back inside. It was all over in about five seconds.
I was stunned. Initially I thought that I should go in and throw the money back at the guy and tell him that I don't take kindly to racist asshats existing in the first place, let alone assuming I share their convictions just because I happen to be (mostly) white. But then I thought "I'd rather have that dollar to spend on something useful, like a toll road, than for that idiot to keep it and donate to the KKK or buy some racist tschotschkes," and I went back to the toll booth and paid the lady. You can tell this whole episode still bothers me more than a decade later. What I worry about most is that this guy probably concluded, since I said nothing, that there were kindred racist asshat spirits out there, and was subsequently bolder in his ignorance. I also should have said something to the toll booth lady about her coworker - I would want that, were I in her position - but to avoid social awkwardness (read: out of smallness) I did not.
There's no shade of gray in taking away a few bucks from a politically powerful lobby by exploiting their followers' delusions. That's good. On the other hand, the ironic intentions don't translate into a morally different result from selling the stuff in earnest unless you let your victims in on the joke. By selling woo to wingnuts and not ever telling them it's woo, you're reinforcing bad thinking through commerce, like I may have reinforced Mr. Asshat. Plus, how are you different from any other televangelist then? Consequently, redemption comes from revealing the intention: if that cyberprayer site is a joke and a month from now, the owner sends emails out to all past customers saying "we were a fraud the whole time, and the reason you couldn't tell is because all prayer is nonsense", maybe next time those customers will actually think before spending money on evidenceless claptrap. If it's a joke site but the owner gets too attached to his passive income stream and never says anything, then it's socially immoral, because he's just reinforcing woo.
Where I draw the line with this sort of thing is at mentally ill or retarded people who have basic problems with social function and can't take care of themselves. If a mumbling street person comes up to me and offers me $100 for some aluminum foil to make a hat to keep out the CIA mind lasers, I wouldn't make the transaction, and I would encourage them to get help, however futile that might be (as in the case of, for example, a blog providing rational arguments for not believing in gods - but hey, you tried.)
But, folks, here's the good news. All your frustrated wondering at how religious folks can function in their daily lives, believing in the literal word of Scripture for some things but somehow dividing that from the rest of their behavior so they can keep the lights on and feed themselves - all that puzzlement now pays off. The consequence of successful doublethink: since religious people are capable of taking care of themselves, and are socially functional, it's not your responsibility to protect them from their delusions. So if you can sell them magic sticks, holy water, herbal cures, online prayers, etc. then do it - as long as, sooner rather than later, you go very public with the fact that it was all a sham, and these people should have known better. After all, why should a Christian care if the person behind the prayer site doesn't believe prayer works, and sends out a mass email revealing that it was a big joke? That doesn't change whether or not it really does work - and if there's no way of proving whether the prayer was said and had the intended effect (because it's all woo), then that's the customer's problem. Amen? No. Caveat emptor!
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
God is No Good at Rebounds
...at least He wasn't in 2008. Teams from religious universities advanced 23.8% worse than the average team in March Madness, and on average came into the tournament seeded worse.
I'm still calculating my picky-picks for this year. As mentioned before, last year I came in at the Sweet 16 stage and got 14 out of 15 right, including the champs.
I'm still calculating my picky-picks for this year. As mentioned before, last year I came in at the Sweet 16 stage and got 14 out of 15 right, including the champs.
Creationist Shenanigans on the Texas School Board
Chair of the Texas State Board of Education Don McElroy has endorsed an explicitly religious screed which excoriates the National Academy of Sciences for - gasp - advocating evolution. It should be pointed out that McElroy's nomination to this position by Governor Rick Perry is coming up for a confirmatory vote. Live in Texas? Friends and relatives in Texas? Sound the alarm!
It's very curious that the state with NASA Mission Control, the tech center of Austin, a biotech industry and some of the best medical centers in the country seems dead-set on squandering all that and wrecking its future economy by teaching witchcraft. In particular, I wonder how self-described conservatives feel about relinquishing America's technical edge to Japan, Korea and China?
It is very much worth emphasizing that I got this link from Andrew Sullivan's blog. Andrew Sullivan is a political blogger who happens to be a devout Catholic, but understands the benefit of separating church and state. While as atheists we think his beliefs are wrong, it's important to separate philosophical goals from political ones, and atheism is really a political problem. Consequently I'm happy Sullivan (and Ken Miller, and many others) side with us on these issues.
It's very curious that the state with NASA Mission Control, the tech center of Austin, a biotech industry and some of the best medical centers in the country seems dead-set on squandering all that and wrecking its future economy by teaching witchcraft. In particular, I wonder how self-described conservatives feel about relinquishing America's technical edge to Japan, Korea and China?
It is very much worth emphasizing that I got this link from Andrew Sullivan's blog. Andrew Sullivan is a political blogger who happens to be a devout Catholic, but understands the benefit of separating church and state. While as atheists we think his beliefs are wrong, it's important to separate philosophical goals from political ones, and atheism is really a political problem. Consequently I'm happy Sullivan (and Ken Miller, and many others) side with us on these issues.
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
St. Francis Xavier Day and Green Sake
I was out tonight with the wife having our mandatory, terrible green beer, and I wondered aloud: "If Patrick was the patron saint of Ireland, who was the patron saint of Japan?" My wife is Japanese, and perhaps not surprisingly, didn't know this off the top of her head.
This might seem a strange thing for an atheist to wonder about, especially one who is ethnically Lutheran and has no Catholics anywhere in his family tree (well, since I'm mostly German-Austrian, at least since the 30 Years War). But as I've mentioned before, the workings of the Catholic Church's management fascinate me.
Turns out the patron saint of Japan was a Basque from the Navarre province of Spain named Francis Xavier. When I mentioned the name, my wife recognized it - he was a major figure in the early history of Japan's contact with the West, arriving a century before the Tokugawa Shoguns closed the country to outside contact. One passage from the Wikipedia article jumped out at me:
"The Japanese people were not easily converted; many of the people were already Buddhist. Francis had difficulty convincing them that God had created everything. In their eyes then, God was responsible for evil and sin; they had a difficult time grasping how a kind God would act in such a way."
Good question! And impressive - completely Abrahamic-naive subjects cut right to the insoluble conundrum of theodicy in no time flat!
Two other interesting points. When Francis Xavier asked his translator if the Japanese would convert, he was cautioned "they would not do so immediately". It's been four-and-a-half centuries and still no dice; "not immediately" may have been understated. Also, this particular Spaniard was smart enough to try to dress up Christianity in familiar robes like the best marketing consultant of all time, Paul, and he used the same name for his own deity that Shingon monks did (this is the Buddhist sect my father-in-law's family comes from). But when old F.X. changed the name, the benefits of familiar terminology evaporated.
This might seem a strange thing for an atheist to wonder about, especially one who is ethnically Lutheran and has no Catholics anywhere in his family tree (well, since I'm mostly German-Austrian, at least since the 30 Years War). But as I've mentioned before, the workings of the Catholic Church's management fascinate me.
Turns out the patron saint of Japan was a Basque from the Navarre province of Spain named Francis Xavier. When I mentioned the name, my wife recognized it - he was a major figure in the early history of Japan's contact with the West, arriving a century before the Tokugawa Shoguns closed the country to outside contact. One passage from the Wikipedia article jumped out at me:
"The Japanese people were not easily converted; many of the people were already Buddhist. Francis had difficulty convincing them that God had created everything. In their eyes then, God was responsible for evil and sin; they had a difficult time grasping how a kind God would act in such a way."
Good question! And impressive - completely Abrahamic-naive subjects cut right to the insoluble conundrum of theodicy in no time flat!
Two other interesting points. When Francis Xavier asked his translator if the Japanese would convert, he was cautioned "they would not do so immediately". It's been four-and-a-half centuries and still no dice; "not immediately" may have been understated. Also, this particular Spaniard was smart enough to try to dress up Christianity in familiar robes like the best marketing consultant of all time, Paul, and he used the same name for his own deity that Shingon monks did (this is the Buddhist sect my father-in-law's family comes from). But when old F.X. changed the name, the benefits of familiar terminology evaporated.
Study: Religious People Take More Aggressive End-of-Life Measures
A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association conducted at Dana Farber Cancer Center in Boston concludes that patients who use religion as a coping mechanism make more aggressive end-of-life treatment decisions. They're far more determined than non-religious patients to use every possible avenue to fight off death.
This not only falsifies one atheist comedian's statement that atheists are most scared of dying, it raises several interesting questions. The first one is obvious: if you believe a better life is in store for you after sloughing off this mortal coil, why not exit gracefully and forego all the aggressive interventions?
A religious person might argue that on the contrary, their holy scripture of choice specifies that life is sacred and must be protected at all costs. It's appropriate for us to ask where and how said scripture specifies exactly what modern medical end-of-life care measures are called for. The real world ethical issue here is whether it's within the treating physician's resopnsibilities to be asking those questions. Since the belief system affects care delivery, it's hard to see it's not the physician's duty.
It is also clearly the case that life-maintenance through many of these methods (intubation, ventilation, turning to prevent bedsores) is extremely unnatural; the sad spectacle of the Terry Schiavo makes this point for us. The relevance here is that the religious tendency to preserve life, in this case, avoids the usual dialog about what is natural or unnatural; in most other situations like birth control or genetic engineering, this point is front and center.
This not only falsifies one atheist comedian's statement that atheists are most scared of dying, it raises several interesting questions. The first one is obvious: if you believe a better life is in store for you after sloughing off this mortal coil, why not exit gracefully and forego all the aggressive interventions?
A religious person might argue that on the contrary, their holy scripture of choice specifies that life is sacred and must be protected at all costs. It's appropriate for us to ask where and how said scripture specifies exactly what modern medical end-of-life care measures are called for. The real world ethical issue here is whether it's within the treating physician's resopnsibilities to be asking those questions. Since the belief system affects care delivery, it's hard to see it's not the physician's duty.
It is also clearly the case that life-maintenance through many of these methods (intubation, ventilation, turning to prevent bedsores) is extremely unnatural; the sad spectacle of the Terry Schiavo makes this point for us. The relevance here is that the religious tendency to preserve life, in this case, avoids the usual dialog about what is natural or unnatural; in most other situations like birth control or genetic engineering, this point is front and center.
And On the Eighth Day, He Stole Intellectual Property
I wrote before about the similarities between creationism supports and other conspiracy-theory maniacs (like the moon landing hoax crowd). It's a claim made explicitly by Kent Hovind and in Ben Stein's Expelled, which is explicitly about the Darwinian conspiracy to suppress truth - a conspiracy that scientists, doctors, major Wall Street investors, most Western and East Asian governments, and one to two billion of their citizens are all in on it - shhhh! Don't blow it! Of course, is it still a conspiracy when the majority of people are in it, and the conspiracy's members are constantly and openly recruiting? I should go stand on a street corner and recruit for the Bilderburgers and see how that goes!
I think it's high time we started calling the creationists conspiracy theorists. They themselves clamor that this is what their movement is. It's also time to start pointing out the pattern they fall into along with the Chemtrails mob, the vaccines-cause-autism-mob, the Elders-of-Zion mob - the whole lot of them.
I haven't read ERV before, but today I saw that her posts provide a great history to date of the Expelled production team's theft of copyrighted animation material, and correspondence related to the ongoing proceedings. And in the behavior of the Expelled producers, the ugly conspiracy-theorist pattern of not quite being able to constrain oneself to the right side of the law, and of compulsive track-covering, is on full display. They're either doing it because they have no concept of intellectual property and are in general floundering in the sea of modernity, or they're actively immoral and covering their tracks. It's a fun game to figure out which it is - a game that will be played in an American courtroom. Either way, the pattern of behavior is there.
I think it's high time we started calling the creationists conspiracy theorists. They themselves clamor that this is what their movement is. It's also time to start pointing out the pattern they fall into along with the Chemtrails mob, the vaccines-cause-autism-mob, the Elders-of-Zion mob - the whole lot of them.
I haven't read ERV before, but today I saw that her posts provide a great history to date of the Expelled production team's theft of copyrighted animation material, and correspondence related to the ongoing proceedings. And in the behavior of the Expelled producers, the ugly conspiracy-theorist pattern of not quite being able to constrain oneself to the right side of the law, and of compulsive track-covering, is on full display. They're either doing it because they have no concept of intellectual property and are in general floundering in the sea of modernity, or they're actively immoral and covering their tracks. It's a fun game to figure out which it is - a game that will be played in an American courtroom. Either way, the pattern of behavior is there.
Monday, March 16, 2009
I Repeat: The Open Society Has Enemies
In this article, you can read about the following (and other) nightmare scenarios: a girl reports her (priest) father for abuse. The social worker she reports it to doesn't believe her, and informs her father. After she gets beaten badly by her father the girl goes back to the social worker, who tells her "It’s not right to betray your community." The time is past to have a mush-headed understanding of the basis of tolerance. This woman converted to another faith, which is really just converting from Batmanism to Supermanism - but in secular, civilized governments, people have the right to do so, and if Batmanists are serially abusing women, cultural sensitivity is not the answer.
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Harun Yahya and the Civil War of Woo
Harun Yahya posts his most recent attack on science and reason - he discusses a "Darwinist dictatorship" (yes, really - they must be the ones keeping him from hiring a decent copy editor for his colorful book). The guy even mentions freemasonry. How quaintly nineteenth century! Why nothing about the moon landing being faked? I also looked to see if there's a secret message about the Templars spelled down the side, but so far nothing.
What I love is that he's instigating a Civil War of Woo. If you're a Mormon or evangelical creationist in the United States, what position can you take here? You either say creationism is right, and side with a devout Muslim creationist. Or, you side with his enemy - the pro-Darwin Church of Rome. Nice! By "nice" I mean TOTALLY NICE!
What I don't love is the part of the world where Yahya is publishing his nonsense. If you've never heard of Triumph Publications before, that's probably because they're based in Nigeria. There is method to Yahya's madness. Nigeria has the misfortune of laying astride the border between post-colonial fundamentalist African Christianity, and encroaching super-Saharan fundamentalist Islam. Consequently it's a prime candidate for first major flashpoint in the battle between Islam and global Southern Christianity that Philip Jenkins identifies in The Next Christendom. This is likely the reason Yahya is writing to a Nigerian publication, in a part of the world where the educational system might not have been able so far to instill the best critical thinking skills into the local citizenry. Nigeria is also not the most digital country there is, so we can safely assume this one online article is the tip of an iceberg of pamphlets and even cheaper tricks flooding the cities there.
What I love is that he's instigating a Civil War of Woo. If you're a Mormon or evangelical creationist in the United States, what position can you take here? You either say creationism is right, and side with a devout Muslim creationist. Or, you side with his enemy - the pro-Darwin Church of Rome. Nice! By "nice" I mean TOTALLY NICE!
What I don't love is the part of the world where Yahya is publishing his nonsense. If you've never heard of Triumph Publications before, that's probably because they're based in Nigeria. There is method to Yahya's madness. Nigeria has the misfortune of laying astride the border between post-colonial fundamentalist African Christianity, and encroaching super-Saharan fundamentalist Islam. Consequently it's a prime candidate for first major flashpoint in the battle between Islam and global Southern Christianity that Philip Jenkins identifies in The Next Christendom. This is likely the reason Yahya is writing to a Nigerian publication, in a part of the world where the educational system might not have been able so far to instill the best critical thinking skills into the local citizenry. Nigeria is also not the most digital country there is, so we can safely assume this one online article is the tip of an iceberg of pamphlets and even cheaper tricks flooding the cities there.
Not Only Christian Leaders Are Hypocrites
It turns out the Ted Haggartys of the world aren't alone in towering, repulsive hypocrisy. It's nice to see that some principles are universal. The open society has enemies.
Saturday, March 14, 2009
Stem Cell Research - Answers for Tired Religious Arguments
Today I was surfing the AM dial and of course ran across a fair share of religious right maniacs, talking about Obama's efforts to begin the Clone Wars. The arguments they put forth are always the same, and they crumble under the least scrutiny. Working in biotech I think about the stem cell question a fair bit, so here are some of the most egregious problems in what the anti-stem cell mob is saying, and how to stop them in their tracks.
First and foremost, there's an increasing implication that stem cell research proponents are part of a big conspiracy, President Obama (of course) chiefly among them. The implication is not just that Obama and the scientific community are rejecting traditional religious pro-life arguments, but that they're actively trying to destroy embryos and in general degrade the sanctity of life. We can call them on it. When you see this in comment sections of online publications or hear this on campus, ask: do you really believe that Obama, and thousands of American men and women doing medical research, are interested in actively pushing forward a program to destroy human life? If so, exactly why would this be?
Second is the notion that there are equal or better options for conducting medical research than stem cell research. This recapitulates the first question: if that's really true, then why have scientists and doctors been rejoicing at Obama's reversal of Bush's restrictions? Because they're blood-thirsty embryo-eaters? This assertion is especially interesting to me as a drug research professional because it's exactly the same assertion that animal rights activists make: there are better options out there, but drug companies insist on testing on animals. Apparently, we only spend all this money and time on animal tests because we get a kick out of cruelty. So, you can tell the anti-stem cell folks that they're making the same arguments as animal rights activists (that'll piss'em off). Challenge them to differentiate the two arguments; ask them why, exactly, scientists insist on using this technology if it isn't useful.
Third - and this applies to religious arguments against abortion too - if the anti-stem cell mob really believes that a fertilized embryo is a human being, do they support the same penalties for scientists who destroy an embryo in the course of research as they do for someone who shoots a cashier in the course of an armed robbery? If not, why the heck not? For that matter, when a woman has a miscarriage (of a fertilized embryo) which is the outcome of over half of all pregnancies - should manslaughter charges be brought? If not, why the heck not? Don't fail to point out that hesitation on these points means they clearly don't really believe that a fertilized embryo is the same as a human being.
An embryo is a single cell - smaller than the mass of millions of cells that make up an insect's brain - and has no capacity to suffer. This is a fact. No doubt Christians would argue that the ability to suffer is irrelevant, and Scripture tells us human life is sacred. Again, exactly where does it say that? And if the question of suffering really is irrelevant, then wouldn't you also protect corpses from being desecrated as a result of their post-death handling? But it looks like someone beat me to the punch. Talk about a walking reductio ad absurdum.
First and foremost, there's an increasing implication that stem cell research proponents are part of a big conspiracy, President Obama (of course) chiefly among them. The implication is not just that Obama and the scientific community are rejecting traditional religious pro-life arguments, but that they're actively trying to destroy embryos and in general degrade the sanctity of life. We can call them on it. When you see this in comment sections of online publications or hear this on campus, ask: do you really believe that Obama, and thousands of American men and women doing medical research, are interested in actively pushing forward a program to destroy human life? If so, exactly why would this be?
Second is the notion that there are equal or better options for conducting medical research than stem cell research. This recapitulates the first question: if that's really true, then why have scientists and doctors been rejoicing at Obama's reversal of Bush's restrictions? Because they're blood-thirsty embryo-eaters? This assertion is especially interesting to me as a drug research professional because it's exactly the same assertion that animal rights activists make: there are better options out there, but drug companies insist on testing on animals. Apparently, we only spend all this money and time on animal tests because we get a kick out of cruelty. So, you can tell the anti-stem cell folks that they're making the same arguments as animal rights activists (that'll piss'em off). Challenge them to differentiate the two arguments; ask them why, exactly, scientists insist on using this technology if it isn't useful.
Third - and this applies to religious arguments against abortion too - if the anti-stem cell mob really believes that a fertilized embryo is a human being, do they support the same penalties for scientists who destroy an embryo in the course of research as they do for someone who shoots a cashier in the course of an armed robbery? If not, why the heck not? For that matter, when a woman has a miscarriage (of a fertilized embryo) which is the outcome of over half of all pregnancies - should manslaughter charges be brought? If not, why the heck not? Don't fail to point out that hesitation on these points means they clearly don't really believe that a fertilized embryo is the same as a human being.
An embryo is a single cell - smaller than the mass of millions of cells that make up an insect's brain - and has no capacity to suffer. This is a fact. No doubt Christians would argue that the ability to suffer is irrelevant, and Scripture tells us human life is sacred. Again, exactly where does it say that? And if the question of suffering really is irrelevant, then wouldn't you also protect corpses from being desecrated as a result of their post-death handling? But it looks like someone beat me to the punch. Talk about a walking reductio ad absurdum.
Finding Friends Everywhere
Me oh my, this is a zeitgeist. A week or two ago I found my new favorite neuro-philosophy blog, and found coincidentally that he was a fan of Randi and had his own battles with Discovery Institute running dogs. And now, I'm on my way to a run in Pescadero Creek County Park and I stop at the San Gregorio General Store, exactly the kind of quirky, awesome general store and bar and bookstore that you would expect on the California central coast. And among the several books on display? Phil Zuckerman's Society Without God, Sam Harris's Letter to a Christian Nation, and a book of lesser-known Ben Franklin quotations that no doubt contain some pithy dissections of religion. Those poll numbers don't lie.