I just started my day with a dose of outrage. The notion of hell exists in many religions and denominations. If a person believed it to be torture and that his friends or family members would suffer eternally unless they converted, it makes sense for them to evangelize.
What a powerfully successful meme. What a sick, twisted, and fucked up belief system.
I almost blew a blood vessel watching the following bullshit. It’s a hypothetical letter from hell written by a teenager to his Christian friend describing the terrible agony and asking why he didn’t evangelize.
I refuse to watch it again to type up a transcript of any kind.
I used to think that John Stuart Mill was right that when ideas were freely exchanged the marketplace of ideas would eventually expose the truth and that people would come to know it for the truth. But then I started learning more about the flaws and weaknesses in human reasoning and perception. We’re extremely vulnerable to this kind of emotional manipulation, and it threatens to overwhelm our rational faculties. Being true is different from being convincing. I no longer trust that the truth will win out.
Talk about intellectual cowardice. This entire argument is a blatant appeal to emotion which should be dispelled by stopping to think for 10 seconds. But when you’re irrationally terrified, it’s hard to form rational thoughts. Too often, religion uses bad logical arguments slipped in the ‘emotional’ side door to our beliefs.
These are the memes we are up against. People believe it because they themselves have been affected by the meme. I give them credit for genuinely believing in the horror of hell and for – understandably – wanting their friends and family to avoid it.
We are not up against the people who believe; we are up against the memes that have infected society and are spreading irrational fear. It’ll be a tough struggle – we can’t overcome the inherent flaws in our evolved brains. But I for one think it’s a struggle worth having.
Even for those who don’t believe in luck, we know that some people feel luckier than others. Some people stumble across good jobs, good dates, and good opportunities for no discernible reason. What can you do to become luckier? According to this 2003 article I just came across, you listen to Richard Wiseman (who, by the way, has a great blog).
I gave both lucky and unlucky people a newspaper, and asked them to look through it and tell me how many photographs were inside. On average, the unlucky people took about two minutes to count the photographs, whereas the lucky people took just seconds. Why? Because the second page of the newspaper contained the message: “Stop counting. There are 43 photographs in this newspaper.” This message took up half of the page and was written in type that was more than 2in high. It was staring everyone straight in the face, but the unlucky people tended to miss it and the lucky people tended to spot it.
Personality tests revealed that unlucky people are generally much more tense than lucky people, and research has shown that anxiety disrupts people’s ability to notice the unexpected.
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My research revealed that lucky people generate good fortune via four basic principles. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.
My one comment (besides, “isn’t that so interesting?”) would be that he didn’t mention the necessity of preparation. I imagine that if you prepare for a variety of circumstances, you’ll be able to get the best outcomes and seem lucky. Bad events won’t seem as unlucky and you’ll be ready to take full advantage of the good events.
Wiseman was even able to train people to become (feel) luckier!
I asked a group of lucky and unlucky volunteers to spend a month carrying out exercises designed to help them think and behave like a lucky person. These exercises helped them spot chance opportunities, listen to their intuition, expect to be lucky, and be more resilient to bad luck.
One month later, the volunteers returned and described what had happened. The results were dramatic: 80 per cent of people were now happier, more satisfied with their lives and, perhaps most important of all, luckier. While lucky people became luckier, the unlucky had become lucky.
I’m reminded of a quote attributed to Niels Bohr. His friend noticed a horseshoe hanging above Bohr’s door and asked why he put it up, given that he didn’t believe in luck. Bohr replied, “I don’t believe in luck, but I hear it works even if you don’t believe.”
Having a “lucky” talisman can give people confidence – and thus lead to better results. It becomes a self-reinforcing and helpful belief. I might hesitate before bursting that bubble by arguing with them that luck doesn’t exist. But if “luck” is just a combination of learnable skills, we would be empowering people, not breaking a spell by alerting people to the fact.
I found this article fascinating. Of course, I always love it when we come up with rational reasons for things that we previously considered out of our control, but it’s particularly relevant to me right now. I’m in the process of looking for a new job (update on that soon) and trying to have a “resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good”.
Isn’t it “lucky” that I found this article when I did?
The late senator Kennedy used to be quite good on separation of church and state issues, but he had a weakness for helping Christian Science. Call me cynical if you like, but it might have to do with the fact that the Church of Christ, Scientist is based in Boston and has political clout. Now that John Kerry is the senior senator in Massachusetts, he’s taking over where Kennedy left off. The LATimes reports:
Backed by some of the most powerful members of the Senate, a little-noticed provision in the healthcare overhaul bill would require insurers to consider covering Christian Science prayer treatments as medical expenses.
The provision was inserted by Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) with the support of Democratic Sens. John F. Kerry and the late Edward M. Kennedy, both of Massachusetts, home to the headquarters of the Church of Christ, Scientist.
The measure would put Christian Science prayer treatments — which substitute for or supplement medical treatments — on the same footing as clinical medicine. While not mentioning the church by name, it would prohibit discrimination against “religious and spiritual healthcare.”
Yes, this is obviously nonsense. While I expected this of Hatch, Kerry typically gets it right. But don’t be disheartened! When I worked for the Secular Coalition, we were lobbying on this issue - as it turns out, there was some positive news on the House side last week:
The Secular Coalition for America is thrilled that the House of Representatives has decided to remove language found in all three draft bills that would require private and public plans to cover the spiritual care of individuals with religious objections to medical care.
Today the House released their version of the health care reform bill that did not include language requiring private and public health plans to cover spiritual care for any person. This “spiritual care” includes reimbursements for payments that Christian Scientists make to members of the Church who pray for them when they are ill.
So! Here’s where we stand: the offending provision will probably be in the final Senate bill – it has the cover of being a bipartisan effort and that chamber is less favorable to our issues. But it isn’t in the House versions. Before a full vote, it will be up to the party leadership to reconcile the versions – that’s where the real decision will be made.
There’s hope yet, although it would be nice if we didn’t have to keep fighting for minor victories in what is already supposed to be a secular government.
We humans are so intent on finding meaning in things that we have a tendency to find it even where none was intended. It’s what we call a false positive and it happens all the time. We often hear about people seeing the Jesus or the virgin Mary in a particular piece of toast, water stain, or IKEA bathroom woodwork. But we usually associate it with images, not words, making this story about Governor Schwarzenegger particularly valuable.
It turns out that Schwarzenegger sent a veto letter to the state legislature. This is nothing out of the ordinary and wouldn’t be worth my mentioning, so you must know that there’s more of the story to come. No, it’s the “secret message” that got attention – see if you can find it (image from the San Francisco Bay Guardian):
But wait — there’s a real message, an actual missive from the Gov to Tom, embedded in this text. And it’s not hard to find — in fact, it’s hard to believe it could have been a coincidence.
Read down the letters on the left side of the message
If you read along the left-most column and take the first letter of each line, you get “I fuck you”. This was seen as a dastardly and immature prank. But I’m betting that the odds of a ‘coincidence’ like this are higher than intuition suggests.
To be honest, I’m not particularly interested in whether of not the message was intended, but the story does raise an interesting question: how likely are we to find a “hidden message” where none was intended?
It’s absolutely possible that the message was deliberate – I certainly used to do that sort of thing in my English papers (I hated the classes and needed some creative way to keep the projects interesting). There are also other important factors – there was a feud between the governor and the politician in question, the wording is stilted, etc. But as it stands, I’m not willing to rule out the null hypothesis (a hilarious coincidence) quite yet.
It looks like Brad Johnson at the Wonk Room tried the kind of analysis I was envisioning. He says the odds of that particular phrase are about 1 in a trillion, taking into account the likelihood of different letters being the start of each word.
Now, the likelihood that some phrase would be spelled out? Ignoring letter distribution, there’s about a 0.3% chance any four letter string is a common English word, and a 3% chance any three letter string is a common English word. The specific likelihood of the words “soap” and “poet” appearing, for example, given the Schwarzenegger speeches, is one in 100,000 — much greater than the one in 10 million shot of “fuck” appearing.
As letter distribution would make the appearance of common words more likely (e.g. “teas”), the probability of some two-word combination appearing is on the order of two percent. The likelihood of it making any sense, of course, is smaller. A more accurate estimation is left to the reader.
Good to see there are fellow nerds in the world interested in spending time on the question! But what’s missing from Brad’s analysis is the possibility of messages hidden other ways – we would be similarly remarking had the message been at the end of each line instead of the beginning. Or had the message been in the first letter of consecutive words. Or the last letter of consecutive words. Or in another language. Or backwards. This would surely increase the potential for “hidden” messages dramatically.
I should see how often “hidden messages” appear in the Bible.
This is a job for Python! Quick – to the bat-computer lab!
This post is by Jesse Galef, who is stepping in today.
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I know they do things differently “across the pond” but I was still surprised to read that in a legal case in England, climate change belief was given the same legal status as religion. No joke.
Tim Nicholson is a strong environmentalist to the point that he refuses to travel by air. He believes this was a factor in his recent termination and wants to sue for wrongful discrimination. This week, a judge ruled that his environmentalism qualifies as a “genuinely held philosophical belief for the purpose of the 2003 Religion and Belief Regulations” and that he could proceed with a lawsuit.
Mr Nicholson hailed the Employment Appeals Tribunal ruling as “a victory for common sense” but stressed climate change was “not a new religion”.
He said: “I believe man-made climate change is the most important issue of our time and nothing should stand in the way of diverting this catastrophe.
“This philosophical belief that is based on scientific evidence has now been given the same protection in law as faith-based religious belief.
“Belief in man-made climate change is not a new religion, it is a philosophical belief that reflects my moral and ethical values and is underlined by the overwhelming scientific evidence.”
His lawyer Shah Qureshi, head of employment law at Bindmans LLP, argued that if the ruling had gone against them, “the end result would be that the more evidence there is to support your views, the less likely it would be for you to enjoy protection against discrimination”.
Now, I don’t know enough about the British law to comment on the judge’s decision – it might be an accurate dispensation of their written laws. But this is a great example of how complex the issue of secularism can be and how tough it is to implement. We don’t want the state to define religion – that would be none of their authority – and without a definition we have other problems.
This situation reminds me off is the so-called “conscience protection clauses” that are typically associated with the religious right here in America. Senator Enzi tried to slip one in the healthcare bill – I remember because when I was with the Secular Coalition we lobbied against it. It states that if a healthcare employee feels a particular act violates their conscience, he or she can refuse to do so without fear of being fired. In context, it usually means that someone can refuse to assist in like abortions, sell contraception, or provide end of life care. Our position has generally been that if your supernatural beliefs are affecting your job performance, you might have chosen the wrong job and companies have the right to dismiss you.
I suppose that if a country is going to have a law like the “conscience protection clause” for religion, it might as well apply for nonreligious moral systems, right?
Wait, I just thought of something: I have a sincere belief, based on science and philosophy, that religion is incorrect and that it is immoral to promote faith. In my job search, perhaps I should consider applying for the clergy in England – I could get paid while conscientiously refusing to work!
This post is by Jesse Galef, who is stepping in today.
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I’m overwhelmed by the irony of religious individuals committing crimes to proclaim the morality of religion. Once again, one of our most non-confrontational billboards has been vandalized. The billboard reading “Millions are good without God” in Moscow, Idaho had the ‘out’ in ‘without’ painted over with blue paint:
Image from KHQ06 website
The statement being made is arguably true: millions of people are good with God – or at least with a belief in God, which is typically the issue in question. (One could argue that, because there are no gods, everyone good on Earth is good without God.) But to vandalize a peaceful message and stifle our free speech is not… what’s the word I’m looking for here… good.
Either the perpetrators know they’re doing a bad deed or they believe what they’re doing is good. Which is scarier?
At least some good will come of this: even more publicity and more conversation on the role of religion in morality.
My dad puts special time and talent into carving unique and beautiful pumpkins each year. He bases his design on a specific story, sketches out an elaborate image, and uses special carving tools instead of a knife. I thought that looking at pictures would be a nice way to start the week. This pumpkin is actually from a couple of years ago, but it seems particularly appropriate for us. All descriptions and pictures were taken by my dad, Barry Galef, and more pictures from other years’ are up on his website.
As part of a charity auction, my dad was challenged to show all of 20th century physics on his pumpkin. My dad rose to the occasion:
The last few years I’ve donated a Jack O’ Lantern to a charity auction. A friend was the highest bidder this year, and I offered him the chance to weigh in on the design. He said I’d done enough old folk tales, and wanted something modern. “Oh, like Kafka’s ‘Metamorphoses?’”No. I want . . . the whole history of 20th Century Physics! It must have both the special and general theories of relativity, quantum mechanics, Schrodinger’s Cat, and Einstein insisting that God does not play dice with the universe!” At first I thought he was out of his gourd, but later realized he was truly inspired. I proceeded to try my best.
In my illustration, I show God the Father as pictured by Michaelangelo along with Albert Einstein. God is tossing the dice — but every face on his dice has only a single pip! Thus, any way they fall, we end up with snake eyes. So Einstein is both right and wrong: the dice are tossed, but God has no doubt of the result.
Einstein is shown as God’s right-hand man, perhaps an unintended blasphemy. Albert is flipping Schrodinger’s Cat, in a reference to the randomness of flipping a coin.
Einstein flipping Schrodinger’s cat
Alive, dead, alive, dead…
My take on Schrodinger’s cat is that (1) even before we open the box, the cat itself observes whether it’s been poisoned or not, thereby collapsing its own probability wave, and (2) unlike a flipped coin, which lands on heads or tails by random chance, a flipped cat always lands on its feet!
You could say that I’ve left out a lot of 20th century physics. In response, I can claim to have included dark matter, dark energy, and black holes in the design. You just can’t see them. And I do show the curvature of space.
I give my dad a lot of credit for my love of science and my cleverness, and I think this pumpkin is an excellent illustration of why. It’s a shame he didn’t pass on his artisic talent as well…
Thanksgiving and Independence Day are real secular holidays; everyone can participate. I celebrate Christmas as the celebration of the spirit of giving and I celebrate Chanukah as an excuse to eat my Dad’s latkes, but I can understand why other atheists don’t want to celebrate days so closely associated with religious themes.
Halloween is an interesting case though – it seems to be the other way around. Many religious people seem to take issue with this holiday, while I don’t hear complaints from atheists. Americans United for Separation of Church and State put out a press release calling attention to a particular article at Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network:
Put aside your fears of swine flu. TV preacher Pat Robertson’s Web site has just issued a bulletin warning Americans of the real threat we face this season: Demons may be lurking in our Halloween candy.
In a column on the Christian Broadcasting Network’s Web site, writer Kimberly Daniels asserts that “demons” sneak into bags of Halloween candy at grocery stores.
“[M]ost of the candy sold during this season has been dedicated and prayed over by witches,” Daniels wrote. “I do not buy candy during the Halloween season. Curses are sent through the tricks and treats of the innocent whether they get it by going door to door or by purchasing it from the local grocery store. The demons cannot tell the difference.”
The Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, urged Robertson and Daniels to lighten up.
“I’ve heard of the devil being in the details, but to think he’s lurking inside a Snickers bar is a little too much,” Lynn quipped. “Pat Robertson has always peddled some scary stuff, but this is over the top.”
You notice there’s a link in their press release. If you click on it, you’ll notice that the page no longer exists. I did a cursory search, but couldn’t find an explanation. However, I did find Google’s cached version of the page and saved it so that I could show you more juicy bits. You’re welcome.
You may ask, “Doesn’t God have more power than the devil?” Yes, but He has given that power to us. If we do not walk in it, we will become the devil’s prey. Witchcraft works through dirty hearts and wrong spirits.
During this period demons are assigned against those who participate in the rituals and festivities. These demons are automatically drawn to the fetishes that open doors for them to come into the lives of human beings. For example, most of the candy sold during this season has been dedicated and prayed over by witches.
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While the lukewarm and ignorant think of these customs as “just harmless fun,” the vortexes of hell are releasing new assignments against souls. Witches take pride in laughing at the ignorance of natural men (those who ignore the spirit realm).
If you’re interested in hearing more, Barry Lynn is reportedly going to be on “Countdown with Keith Olbermann” tonight on MSNBC to talk about this issue.
On a serious note, Halloween can be harmless fun – I’ve certainly enjoyed it as such. As a child, it was an excuse to be a knight or ring wraith and get candy. As I got older, it was an excuse to drink with my friends. But it can be more. Christmas can make us reflect on the capacity for generosity – and greed – in human nature. Halloween can make us reflect on other aspects of human nature: our penchant for mischief, our fear in the face of the unknown, and our fascination with the forbidden. And yes, our love of candy.
Last Friday HERDdad asked for a regular Friday Funny featuring an amusing skeptic or atheist video. I can forsee a lot of Lewis Black, but might need suggestions from all of you to find more.
That said, I’ve been watching all of the SMBC Theater shorts on youtube. Remember the hilarious “Just a Theory” video Hemant posted earlier this month? Same guys, same level of irreverence.
Enjoy, and let me know about other places I should look for funny videos!
By the way, this is slightly unsafe for work. The cursing is censored, but anytime a video has “I’m Buddha mother fu**er!” I figure I should warn you.
Two days ago, Hemant posted the interview in which Scientologist spokesman Tommy Davis walked off set instead of answering a question about his belief. We can criticize him for being unwilling to admit his own beliefs, but it’s not as if he’ll suffer much. His stunt has gotten him and his church more attention. Most of the publicity is negative, and yet some people are still convinced.
Publicly revealing someone to be a fake/idiot doesn’t hurt them as much as we think. It’s something James Randi has discovered countless times, from his battles with Uri Geller to his exposé of Peter Popoff (who, by the way, is back to his old tricks scamming people in need). But Randi has made unique use of the dramatic insult and walk off technique, and his “Carlos Hoax” came to my mind.
In 1988, James Randi and 60 minutes hatched a plan to show how easy it is for con men to exploit the media. Randi created a fake spirit-channeler named Carlos and pitted him against the Australian media – a group known for their harsh interviews and skepticism. In one week they had gained a following and booked a packed show at the Opera House. During an interview in which Carlos’ methods were being challenged, his manager threw water on the host and stormed off. That in turn sparked more media attention. This is a long video and I’m starting it at the most relevant part, but if this sounds interesting to you (I was fascinated) I recommend the whole thing:
[Around 8 minutes, before I started this clip] One of the roles the Australian media prides itself on is to protect the public from frauds and charlatans. But it does give rise to a problem: in pursuing a questionable character like Carlos, do you end up playing into his hand by giving him too much free publicity? After all, even if you do the best job you can in exposing him, there will still be people vulnerable enough to be taken in.
[end of clip] Why should such a phony care if he had to go through such grillings on TV? He was able to gain access to vulnerable minds who otherwise wouldn’t have heard of him.
I worry that Tommy Davis won some people over by storming off with an outraged air. Creating a “controversy” can give people the impression that there must be something to the argument. That’s why so many scientists refuse to debate creationism – the very debate will lend undeserved credibility to nonsense. Of course, if a topic isn’t publicly debunked, it can fester in the dark.
I tend to come down on the side of public skepticism and scrutiny of ideas, but I’m young and idealistic. I believe that honesty is the best policy and open conversation will tend to expose the truth. I do, however, see the argument for the other side. What do you think?
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I know they do things differently “across the pond” but I was still surprised to read that in a legal case in England, climate change belief was given the same legal status as religion. No joke.
