F Rosa Rubicondior

Sunday 19 June 2011

The Daft Things People Believe

Imagine. You're walking down Main Street one day and you bump into man who is talking to the people in the street as though they're a public meeting. Because you have nothing better to do you slip him some spare change for a drink and get into conversation with him.

He tells you he has come with a special message to the world. Everyone is in mortal danger and only by following him can they be saved.

You decide to humour him a little and ask him how he knows this and what makes him think he’s a messenger.

He tells you his mother was a virgin.

“Okay”, you think. “Let’s see where this is going”. You ask him about this mortal danger that we're all in.

“It's my father.” He explains. “He has something especially unpleasant prepared for you and only I can set you free from it."

“Er... I thought you said your mother was a virgin! How does that square with having a cruel and threatening father?"

“That’s not the point! My mother was a virgin because I’m pure so she mustT have been. Anyway, my father is invisible and doesn't live on Earth. He didn't make her pregnant in the normal way. She saw a man with wings and he told her she was pregnant."

"And another thing! My father isn't cruel. He’s only like that because he loves you. You wouldn't even be here if it wasn't for him!”

Dilemma: should you cross over to the other side of the street out of harm’s way, or should you stay with him to look after him until something can be done for him?

Extraordinary to think that, before we understood mental illness, people used to think this condition was caused by magical beings living inside you. A few people still think that way, apparently.





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Is There Anything More Bizarre Than Religion?

President of the National Academy of Fairy Tales
Imagine a world in which the President of a national Academy of Science issues a statement that the truth about the origin of the universe has been revealed to him. It DID originate as a singularity in a black hole from another universe and this is now the official position of the Academy.

Furthermore, since this is revealed truth, no evidence will be presented as none is needed. Revelation is enough and transcends any need for evidence. There will now be no further controversies in science since all remaining issues will be resolved by the President meditating on the matter and he will announce his revelations in due course.

Henceforth, all true scientists will meet in laboratories every Sunday morning and will declare their adherence to the Academy’s edicts on this and any other matter and will be told this week’s revelations. These meeting are to be conducted by heads of departments who will wear robes appropriate to their rank and dignity.  The audience will listen quietly and respectfully.  No discussion or disagreement is to be permitted.

Any disagreement will result in expulsion from the Academy and heretics will be forbidden from practicing science or associating with any scientists.

Furthermore, the President is now to press for an urgent meeting with senior politicians, legislators and judges to demand that he now be consulted on all matters of public policy which must receive his personal approval before becoming law.  All areas of government, including the military, policing, welfare and education are to be subject to oversight by the Academy.

What a truly bizarre world that would be.

In reality, of course, such a person would be swiftly removed from his post and, in a civilized society, would receive the psychiatric support and medication needed.

Why then does religion operate in just this way?





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Monday 13 June 2011

Inspiring Words

Christopher Hitchens.



Stephen Fry (Part 1).



Stephen Fry (Part 2).



10 Questions Every Intelligent Christian Should Answer.

Saturday 11 June 2011

Christian Morality

No doubt they'll tell you these weren't 'real Christians' either.

Remember, if you're a closet Atheist living in a Christian community and afraid to stand up for what you really believe, you're pretending to be a member of a faith which not only does this to children but will do almost anything to keep the truth from being known.

Soon after this scandal broke, non-belief rocketed in the once staunchly Catholic Republic of Ireland. The Catholic Church is now finding it difficult to recruit Irish men into the priesthood and Enda Kenny, Taoiseach of Dáil Éireann (Dublin Parliament) received wide acclaim for a devastating attack on the Church's leadership.





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Thursday 9 June 2011

Impotence Of Undetectable Gods

If a god can’t be detected by science, it is utterly impotent. There is no escaping this. An undetectable god is indistinguishable from a non-existent god.

Firstly, how does science detect anything?

At its simplest level, science detects the effect of something by measuring or observing its effect on something else. For example:
  • We know how much electricity is flowing through a conductor because of the effect it has on a voltmeter - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voltage
  • We know about gravity by measuring how objects move in a gravity field.
  • We know about photons by measuring the effect they have on photo-sensitive chemicals or photo-electric plates.
  • We know how hot water is by measuring how much the heat expands a column of mercury, a metal bar, how it changes resistance of an electrical conductor, etc.
  • We know about wind-speed by measuring how quickly it rotates a wind-speed detector or anemometer.

Try this for yourself. Can you think of anything science can detect which doesn’t depend on detecting its effect on something else?

In other words, to be detectable by science, something must exert an effect, and to exert an effect on anything means that that effect can be measured. Therefore, anything which cannot be detected cannot possibly be influencing or changing anything in any way, otherwise we could measure it.

An undetectable god is an impotent god and is indistinguishable from a non-existent one. Such a god would be utterly incapable of communicating anything or of creating anything. A universe in which such a god, or gods, exists would be indistinguishable from one with no gods whatsoever.

So, theists, when you use the ‘undetectable by science’ excuse for your god, you are actually telling us your god is utterly impotent. (Tweet this)

So, if your god isn’t impotent, why can’t it be detected?





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Tuesday 7 June 2011

Eric Hovind's Very Silly Questions

I'm not sure who they're aimed at - not people of normal intelligence, that's for sure - but these astoundingly facile questions are what Eric Hovind believes are killer knock-down questions for non-Christians. (Apparently little Eric is either genuinely unaware that other religions offer answers to all these, or is feigning ignorance and relying on his target audience's ignorance to get away with it).

He is also ignorant of, or is feigning ignorance of, the answers to several of these questions which can be found by a moment's search on the Internet, or by going to a decent reference library or any good book shop.

The originals can be seen here: http://www.drdino.com/questions-science-cant-answer/

Let's take a look at them (in red)

Why am I here?
Because you were born. You'll need to talk to your mummy and daddy about how that happened.

Are you maybe assuming that you are so special that you have some special purpose or other? I'm afraid you're just not that important.

What happens when you die?
Your body's physiology ceases, then you begin to decompose. From then on it depends on what people do with your body - cremation, burial, etc. If you're very unfortunate you get eaten by a predator. In extremely rare circumstances, like falling into anoxic sediment or a tar pit, your bones may even become fossilised so biologists of the future can examine you to see what an earlier hominid looked like.

What is the purpose of my life?
What ever purpose you chose to give it. Are you waiting for someone to do that for you?

What determines “Good” and “Evil”?
Human beings have evolved cultural norms which enable them to live and work together in co-operative groups. These are acquired from our parents, peers and authority figures in our culture during our long childhood. The units of cultural inheritance are known as 'memes'.

Where did love come from?
It evolved along with other human emotional responses. To understand it you need to study a little of neurophysiology and how hormones work. I take it this is a closed book to you?

Why does mankind abuse and kill its own?
Often because religious people believe people with different religions are evil and deserve to be killed. Some unfortunate people are born with psychopathic personalities which means they can't tell right from wrong. Many of these rely on a hand-book such as the Bible or Koran, though most who say they do so actually just cherry pick the parts they agree with by reference to their own cultural norms.

Where did the first teeny-weeny molecule of matter come from?
You really don't know much about this stuff do you?

Molecules formed when atoms formed, when the nascent universe had cooled enough to allow electrons to be captured and held by protons. This happened about 300,000 to 500,000 years after the big bang, when the universe had cooled to 6000 degrees Celsius.

This can be found on the Internet or in any decent general science book.



Does a physical world exist beyond my mind?
Yes. You really aren't that important, you know.

Why are there male and female?
Because there is a clear evolutionary advantage, especially in multi-cellular organisms, of frequent re-mixing of genes. This increases the variance upon which natural selection acts and also increases the probability of new combinations of genes with a synergistic result.

Why does it take both sexes to create a new life?
It doesn't. Many organisms reproduce asexually and in those which do reproduce sexually, both gametes (sperm and ovum, ovule and pollen, etc) are already alive at conception, having been produced by living tissues.

Life is not created at any point in the reproductive process. Biology seems to be another area of which you managed to remain ignorant. It's very apparent from that question that you have not much idea what you mean by 'life', or about basic biology.

What is life?
It’s quite obvious that you don’t know what you mean by ‘life’ or have a very hazy notion of what it is, so how would you know if your question has been answered? Are you talking about physiology or some other 'magic' ingredient which you want included and explained so it conforms to some pre-conceived superstition or other?

If the former, it's just chemistry. If the latter, YOU explain what it is; it's not science to make up stuff just to satisfy infantile superstition.

Where did laws come from?
Which laws? Human laws or 'natural' laws? Natural laws are simply descriptions of what happens. They didn't come from anywhere any more so than your weight came from somewhere independent of your body. Maybe you're confusing scientific laws with man-made, proscriptive or prescriptive laws. it's an easy mistake for people who know nothing about science.

If you mean human laws, then there is probably little I can do to teach you if your basic education was that deficient. Were you home-'schooled'?

How did Time, Space and Matter come into existence?
See the answer to that same question which your dad also asked. Kent Hovind's 10 Fallacies Refuted

It's one of the answers both you and your dad have been ignoring and pretending hasn't been answered for months now. You could also have looked it up on the Internet or in any decent book on cosmology and quantum physics.

How did something come from nothing?
You'll find the answer here: What Makes You So Special?

The pertinent paragraph is:
In this universe all observations confirm that gravity is equal to the sum of the other three forms of energy and that, if gravity is the opposing form of the other three, the grand total of energy in the universe is zero. In total energy terms the universe is nothing.
But you'll need to read the earlier part to understand this. I know! I know! That means you'll have to risk learning some basic science, but that's the way it is.

Well there you go. Not exactly up to your dad's standard, laughable though that was, but I'm sure you did your best, even if you DID have to copy some of your dad's old questions to reach 10.

So, now you know your questions can be, and have been, answered, will you continue to claim science can't answer them?





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Sunday 29 May 2011

Jesus and the New Deal

Time and again, whenever you point out the immorality in the Old Testament, things like the command to kill disobedient children and to stone a raped woman if she didn’t scream loudly enough; sanctioning slavery, selling daughters, genocide, etc, you’ll be told that Jesus overturned all that. That Jesus brought with him a ‘new covenant’ or a new deal between Man and God.

You’ll be told this despite the very clear statement to the contrary:
Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.

Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven: but whosoever shall do and teach them, the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.
Well, let’s grant that this passage by Matthew was a mistake (and not just Jesus telling a little porky pie or something added later by some scribe or other to justify something else he was pushing at the time). Let’s grant that Jesus did come to abolish the OT laws and start over again with some new ones.

Basically, what we’re accepting now is that God realised there were so many mistakes in the Bible as it was then, that he needed to send someone to correct them all. Of course we need to suspend belief that an inerrant god wrote the Bible in the first place otherwise we would find it impossible to think there was anything in the Bible which needed correcting.

But let’s indulge our fantasy a little longer see where we get to.

We now have a situation where we ‘know’ Jesus came to overthrow, or at best to correct the Old Testament, because of all the mistakes in it. And we know this for certain because we can read about it in the Bible, which doesn’t have any mistakes in it...

Oops!

Well, let’s ignore the obvious contradiction there and press on.

We also know that we need the salvation that Jesus offers us, in other words, we need to sign up to the New Deal, because it says in the Old Testament, which Jesus has overthrown (or corrected), that we are all sinners...

And we know this because it says so in the inerrant Bible, which Jesus has overthrown (or corrected)...

Forgive me if I started to go round in circles there trying to follow the circular logic...

Even some otherwise intelligent adults will tell you this with complete conviction and will even tell you you have gone wrong if you can’t see the good sense in it...





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Friday 27 May 2011

The God of Personal Necessity

Words of Delusion
This is probably the second most popular religious fallacy and, like the God of the Gaps fallacy is accepted by very many otherwise intelligent people. Like the God of the Gaps fallacy it too is so ludicrous when spelled out that it's astonishing that it's even attempted, yet it crops up time and again in discussion with believers of all creeds.

It takes several forms but essentially the argument is always, there must be a god otherwise the consequences would be [something undesirable, unpleasant or otherwise unacceptable].

Some examples are:
  • There must be a god otherwise there would be no morality;
  • There must be a god otherwise there would be no purpose to my life;
  • There must be a god otherwise I would have nowhere to go when I die;
  • There must be a god otherwise I would not be so special that the universe was created for me;
  • There must be a god otherwise the explanation for everything would be too hard for me to understand;
  • There must be a god otherwise I would be just another animal and I’m too important for that;
  • There must be a god otherwise my invisible friend would not be real;
  • There must be a god otherwise I would just be talking to myself when I pray;
  • There must be a god otherwise my belief in it would be wrong. (This is often referred to as ‘faith’ – I believe it, therefore it must be true.)

There is always the unspoken subtext that this god is the locally popular god, or at the very least, the god I was told to believe in when I was a child. There is never any question that it might be a different one, even one no one has heard of.

And nor is there ever any consideration that things may indeed not be as the believer would like them to be. The idea that the universe may not be compliant and cosy is never considered

There is, of course, absolutely nothing at all in this argument unless it can be shown that somehow, personal necessity creates gods; that somehow gods are obliged to exist if and when believers require them to and these gods have exactly the right characteristics required by personal necessity.

The surprising thing is that this delusion often persists into adulthood and so allows believers to be duped by charlatans who earn a living partly by reassuring them that their god is indeed everything they need it to be. It’s probably the nice warm glow of self-affirmation which makes this such a persistent and attractive fallacy for both religious exploiters and their victims alike.

It's also one of the hardest fallacies to explain to a believer because so much of their persona is invested in this delusion. That their god fills their personal requirements so perfectly and completely is often the reason they subscribe to the 'faith' in the first place. To consider for one moment that their god might not conform to their requirements is to attack their entire reason to be deluded in the first place.





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Wednesday 25 May 2011

God of The Gaps

Almost invariably, any discussion with Creationists or their thinly disguised fashionable version, Intelligent Design advocates, will revolve around their challenge to explain how something happened. Popular subjects are:
  • How could matter come from nothing
  • How could ‘life’ come from non-life
  • How could an eye evolve
  • Who created the law of gravity
  • Any other gap in understanding / knowledge / education

Ignoring for a moment the fact that all these questions have been addresses or are being address by science and are firmly within the domain of science, what’s going on here? What we have are various different versions of the God of the Gaps argument which seems to convince so many Creationists and even some intelligent Christians, Muslims or Jews. Creationists apparently find this utterly convincing, even citing the erroneous claim that these questions can’t be answered by science as their reason to believe in their god.

But... There are three huge and inescapable assumptions here, even if we allow that some questions have not been fully answered yet by science.
  1. Because science hasn’t explained something it never will be able to explain it.
  2. A natural explanation is impossible therefore the only possible explanation must be supernatural.
  3. Only the god in question could have caused it; no other god could possibly have done it, therefore it is proof of [insert whichever god you require].

Creationists chant this fallacy endlessly and triumphantly, assuming it trumps any argument science can put up, and very conscientiously ignore any information, arguments or reasoning which is offered, dismissing it with a shrug and usually just repeating the same questions over and over like some protective mantra.

A few moments thought with more than a faint inkling of history, will tell you that the history of the last 500 years has been one of headlong retreat of religion in the face of science, as the god of the gaps has been evicted from more and more gaps and has had to be constantly re-located and fitted into ever-shrinking and fewer and fewer gaps in human knowledge. So desperate has this process become that many charlatans now make a very good living inventing false gaps into which to fit their false god. The currently fashionable Intelligent Design movement is but one example of this.

So what’s going on here in the Creationist mind? How is the very clear, almost embarrassingly so, fallacy not seen through?

These same Creationists would readily admit that no medical or scientific advance was ever made by scientists who just accepted the gap in knowledge as proof of a god and gave up looking for an answer.

Clearly some proponents of ID/Creationism can see through this fallacy but are relying on the general ignorance of their target marks whom they are seeking to exploit with cynical dishonesty. These are usually easy to spot as they are normally keen to lure people to their websites where there are Creationist books or other materials for sale, or simply naked e-begging appeals for ‘support spreading the word of God’ or some such appeal to gullible people desperate to have their superstition validated.

However, very many Creationists are victims of these charlatans, so clearly they have rationalised holding a blatantly absurd position with respect to their religion whilst finding no problem at all with a holding the opposite view with respect to normal life. They could research the subject and look for the answer themselves. Many of the questions they raise have been fully answered and the answers are readily available in books or on the Internet. Most can be found with a few mouse-clicks on the same computer they are using to post their questions. Very obviously they do not want answers to the questions; it's as though the 'mystery' of the question is far too valuable an asset to spoil with information.

The answer of course, is wilful self-deception and delusion. Some people seem to have the capacity to trick themselves into holding absurd views with utter conviction. The origins of this are childhood gullibility reinforced by peer-pressure and phobia and the desire to fit in and be part of a group. It's as though an adult still believed in Santa or the Tooth Fairy.

Arrogant personal incredulity also plays a part - "I can't understand how that happened, therefore it can't have happened" - as also does the arrogantly parochial assumption, "I don't know how it happened, therefore no one does, therefore it is unknowable, therefore it must have been supernatural". This arrogance is itself reinforced by the equally arrogant assumption that ignorant superstition is a far better way to measure reality than all that learning and reason, so the victim of religion gets a spurious smug feeling of superiority which 'validates' his/her failure to bother learning in the first place.

Some people go further, into the realms of paranoia, and assume any answers science has to offer are part of some conspiracy or other organised by Atheists, Jews, Socialist, etc., or are based on false evidence planted by Satan. The fear of even doubting prevents them seeing the absurdity of their argument and, for them, the constant repetition of it in the presence of, and with the enthusiastic approval of, others with the same delusion, simply reinforces it, as indeed it’s intended to.

This is precisely why the charlatans who parasites these unfortunate victims work so hard to maintain their delusion and feed them this constant drip-feed of fallacies and misinformation to spout proudly to an incredulous public.





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Sunday 22 May 2011

God The Sadist Almighty

If we are to believe the Old Testament, the God of the Jews, Christians and Muslims is inerrantly omniscient; it knows all things past, present and future. It knows absolutely, and in every last detail, everything about you and your future.

If you’re bound for Hellfire, as all Christians, Jews and Muslims believe many or most of us are, the Biblical god has always known this, for all time, way before it created you. It created you in the sure and certain knowledge that you would end up being thrown into the fiery lake of Hellfire.

How then is this god any different to a man whose hobby is breeding kittens to throw them into a fire, or to pour petrol (gasoline) on them and throw a match onto them? If you knew of such a man in your street, what would be your opinion of him?

Would you tell your children to look to him for moral guidance? Would you feel safe in his presence? Would you build wonderful buildings to meet with other admirers and sing songs in his praise? Would you constantly praise him and tell him what a wonderful person he is?

Or would you notify the authorities, try to put a stop to his sick, sadistic activities and warn your children not to go near him or any of his friends or associates?

It would be astonishing if even the primitive Bronze Age tribal nomads whose traditional creation myths were eventually written in the earliest versions of the Bible, believed such a sadistic monster could be a source of morality. In all probability, they were not writing about a loving, moral god, but an object of fear which needed to be controlled with the protective spells, incantations and rituals which random chance had convinced them were the only way to control this capricious, unpredictable, dangerous monster who was about as controllable, predictable, and loving as any other volcano.





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Thursday 19 May 2011

Is Religion a Phobia?

‘God-fearing’: a term used approvingly by Christians and no doubt by Jews and Moslems, as well as other monotheist traditions, to describe those of their religion who believe in their god and act according to its directions as revealed in their respective holy books or by the priests and prophets who represent it.

But what if we substitute the word ‘spider’ for god? What if we talk about spider-fearing people? How about closed spaces, or open spaces; about lifts or flying; about walking through doorways or using new technology?

Would we consider those who feared any of these things rational and worthy of special respect because of their fear, or would we maybe see their condition as a problem which they need help and support to overcome? Would we see it as something which they could, given time and the right treatment, eventually overcome and return to living a normal life?

What I’m talking about here is morbid phobia; irrational, life-changing fears. The sort of fear which becomes part of the sufferer’s identity and around which they, and their family, may have to fit their life and take special measures to accommodate.
A phobia is defined as an irrational and intense fear of a specific object or situation. Phobias are classified as anxiety disorders by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (4th Ed; DSM-IV)

So, how much of a religious person’s life is conditioned by God-fearing, or theophobia to give it it’s correct medical name? How much of a religious person time is spent thinking about their god, and how to avoid it hurting them? How much time is spent seeking its forgiveness or its approval for fear of the consequences of not doing so? How much time do they spend assuring it of their ‘love and obedience’ and otherwise trying to placate, reassure and mollify it?

The answer of course is a great deal of it. Their 'faith' often defines them as people. Asked to describe themselves, most fundamentalists will immediately identify with their religion. "I am a Christian/Moslem who...".

Unlike other phobia, where the response is avoidance and even fleeing the scene, with an omnipresent god this is not an option. The only recourse is to bargain and try to placate and curry favour with it. Watch the reaction of a seriously arachnophobic person to the suggestion that they come close and examine a harmless spider to see for them self there is nothing to worry about. Try talking to them about how a spider's eyes work, or how their silk is made. Now compare that to the reactions of a seriously devout religious fundamentalist when you ask them to examine a few simple questions about their god. Questions like, "Can it create an object so heavy it can’t lift it?", or "Can it create a Euclidean triangle whose internal angles don’t add up to 180 degrees?"

Forced to confront questions of this sort, many religious people can become extremely aggressive, often resorting to verbal abuse and threats, and frequently by avoidance techniques, and even casting protective spells in the form of quotes from their hand-book of ‘faith’ or by attempting to mollify their god by telling you they will ‘pray for you’; even calling on others to assist in this ritual. They clearly perceive these harmless questions as a serious threat much as an arachnophobe perceives a harmless Tegenaria or Araneus not as a thing of beauty but as an object of terror, and so show symptoms of irrational fear.

It’s my contention that much of the behaviour of religious people, especially fundamentalists, is the result not of faith, but of fear; the severity of symptoms being directly related to the degree of extremism of belief from moderate to fundamentalist.

I contend that religion is merely a phobia inculcated into people in childhood by parents and authority figures who suffer from it themselves and who are afraid to NOT infect their unfortunate children with it, just as some sufferers feel compelled to mutilate their children's genitalia. These children often grow up too afraid even to think of escaping from the phobia and so the cycle is repeated in the next generation.

Religious peoples’ irrational responses, irrational behaviour and irrational reasoning is a direct consequence of an irrational, morbidly paranoid phobia – theophobia. We should recognise religions for what they are and call them by their name.





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What Does Rapture Theology Say About Christians?


Why do some Christians crave for the 'Rapture'? What do they think it'll do for them?

And what does this tell us about their morality and their 'Christian love' for their fellow man?
  • The greatest event they can imagine is their god destroying all life on Earth, especially those humans who don't share their 'faith'.
  • They believe that they alone, of all the humans who have ever lived, and of all the human societies throughout history, have got it right; everyone else, without exception, got it wrong.
  • They believe they will be given a grandstand seat to watch everyone else suffering eternal agony, and that this will be a reward for being such good people.
  • They believe they are such good people that they deserve to have everything for themselves when all the 'undeserving' humans have been killed off.
  • They believe they alone are good enough to occupy an exalted place alongside their god whom they believe is creator and ruler of the entire Universe. No one else is, or has ever been, that special.
  • They know this because they have been told by someone else that it's true and despite the complete lack of any corroborating evidence. They believe it simply because they can't imagine NOT being that special.

They actually think that watching other people, and even their loved ones, suffering unimaginable horrors is a reward!

And these Christians condescend to lecture other people on matters of morality, ethics and love, and demand the right to meddle in our legislatures, our courts, our schools, our science, and in all aspects of our lives, including what we do in the privacy of our own homes...

[Later note] If any Christians feel they've been unfairly tarred with the same brush, perhaps they would explain why they don't believe in the Second Coming of Jesus.

The Evolution of Gullibility.

Gullible: easily fooled or cheated ; especially: quick to believe something that is not true
(Miriam-Webster’s http://www.learnersdictionary.com/search/gullible)

Atheists are often quick to point out that religious people are usually religious because they were indoctrinated as children when they were young and gullible. They point to the strong association between geography and religious belief so that you can make a guess about the religion someone was brought up with based on where they were born. In some parts of the world, the Balkans and Northern Ireland for example, this often holds down to the level of the town or village or even the street or housing estate you were born in.

This of course strongly suggests that religious ‘faith’ isn’t something which most people arrive at through independent thought or through examination of the evidence; rather is suggests that they were given their beliefs by their parents, their peers and authority figures in their immediate culture. Any later justification for that belief in terms of presumed evidence or ‘personal experience’, or on the basis of ‘faith’ alone, is a post hoc rationalisation of pre-existing beliefs. For example, if someone has a ‘religious experience’ it is rare for them to interpret this as anything other than a manifestation in some form of the god they were brought up to believe in or in whom many or most of their friends and associates believe. It is rare for a ‘religious experience' to result in conversion to a ‘foreign’ religion. The same applies to so-called out-of-body experience where recalled memories recorded by a malfunctioning, usually anoxic, brain is often interpreted in terms of the locally popular religion.

They fuck you up your mum and dad
They don’t mean to but they do
They fill you with the faults they had
And add so new ones just for you.

Philip Larkin
Why are children so easily persuaded to believe things simply because they are told to, without requiring any evidence? Why do children believe in Santa?

The simple answer is that they are gullible. Gullibility in children is almost a universal trait. It would be rare indeed to find a child below the age of about ten who required solid evidence before believing anything his or her parents said. Children appear to be hard-wired to believe what their parents and other authority figures tell them.

So where did gullibility come from? We know it must have evolved and therefore there must have been a survival advantage to childhood gullibility. Why is gullibility in children an advantage when in adults it places them at a distinct disadvantage in life, prone to being easily fooled and cheated?

As with almost everything else about our evolution, we need to go back to our roots on the plains of East Africa as a relatively weak and defenceless ape and very much part of the food chain of predators like lions, leopards, crocodiles, snakes and even eagles.

As our brains developed so our children needed longer and longer to develop before being capable of independent existence, yet part of acquiring life skills in growing children involves curiosity. Human children have perhaps the longest childhood of any species. Curious children learn about their environments, where food can be found, which trees are easiest to climb, where shelter may be found, etc, etc, etc. Unfortunately, overly curious children are also at risk from predators.

Children who were told to avoid the water-hole where crocodiles live, or the places where pythons lurk and who believe what they were told, would have lived to pass their gullibility on to their children; those who wanted evidence and went to look for themselves would have been quickly removed from the gene pool.

And so we evolved childhood gullibility as a survival strategy. The downside to it is that it has made us susceptible to all manner of superstition, including religion. It has also made children vulnerable to depredation by paedophile priests who exploit this evolved gullibility and deference to authority figures for their own selfish gratification.






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Thursday 21 April 2011

Do You Want to Convert an Atheist?

If you want to convert an Atheist your task should be simple. Atheists believe in evidence; our opinions are based on it and when the evidence changes, or we discover new evidence, we change our opinions. We have no sacred dogmas which can't be questioned; no tenets of 'faith' to which we must subscribe.

This should make us very easy to convert with the following three-step process:

  1. Produce the evidence that you found convincing.
  2. Explain why it is evidence only for your god and not any other. Since people have believed in over 3000 different gods in recorded human history, obviously you will need to show why your evidence couldn't be evidence for any of those.
  3. Explain how a god is the only possible explanation for your evidence and why it can't possibly be explained as the result of a natural process.

Now, since, presumably, you were convinced of your god's existence by just such evidence and just such a process, it shouldn't be too difficult to tell us Atheists where it's to be found and how it meets the above criteria.

In your own time....

(p.s. Opinion isn't evidence and nor is a quote from a book unless the quote refers to authenticated, observable evidence meeting the above criteria).

If you can't find any such evidence or provide any of this explanation, maybe you should be asking yourself why you believe in your god, because one thing is certain: your belief isn't based on evidence or rational analysis... so what is it based on exactly?

[Later note] It seems many Creationists are unsure of what constitutes 'evidence' and imagine it includes ignorance and even the opinions of others. The following blogs may help them gain the necessary understanding to be able to use the above method:

Generic Answer: What Is Evidence.
A Failure to grasp what evidence means.
(Thanks to @kaimatai on Twitter for providing these helpful link)





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Sunday 10 April 2011

Ten Questions for Creationists

Creationists insist their theory of creation is at least as good, if not better, than any scientific theory at explaining the observable facts and that it leaves nothing unexplained. In that case it must easily be able to answer the following questions with little difficulty.
  1. Creationists insist that nothing can come from nothing and everything must have a cause, and that this implies a creator. They claim this to be a fundamental law with no exceptions.
    Holding to this law, out of what was the creator made and who or what caused its creation?

    Alternatively, please explain what your god made the universe from if it couldn't have been from nothing, and who or what created this substance and out of what.

    Alternatively, please explain the reasoning behind the implicit assumption that non-existence rather than existence is the default state, in other words, why there would be nothing rather than something.

  2. Creationists claim information cannot arise spontaneously as this contravenes the second law of thermodynamics, so this implies a designer. A designer with the information needed to create the universe and everything in it must be at least as complex as the universe.
    How did this information arise spontaneously in the designer without contravening the second law of thermodynamics?

    Alternatively, please explain the difference between information and meaning. For example, the following sequence of letters read by an English speaker has no meaning:

    dviratis

    Read by someone in Lithuania however, it has a perfectly clear meaning. How was the second law of thermodynamics involved in that change?

  3. Creationists claim all species went through a genetic bottle-neck of just two (or seven, according to the version being used) individuals which survived a global flood by living on a boat for a while, 6000 years ago.
    How did the genetic diversity we see in most species today, including Homo sapiens, evolve in just 6000 years?

  4. Creationists claim a global flood killed all living land animals apart from just two (or seven) survivors which lived on a boat for several months. This flood covered the highest mountains so must have been at least 30,000 feet deep (the height of Mount Everest), at which depth no land plants could survive. Also, very few plants survive immersion in salt water for more than a few days. None of them are montane species (which would have been the only ones in water shallow enough to allow enough sunlight through for them to survive for the duration of the flood). Additionally, according to the Bible, God destroyed all living substances that weren't in the Ark.
    What did the herbivores eat when they left the boat?

  5. According to creationism, just two (or seven) individuals of each species surviving the flood
    What did the carnivorous species eat when they left the boat without exterminating very many of the surviving species in the first few days and weeks?

  6. Creationism says all living substance was destroyed during the flood. There is no mention of any plant life, including seeds, being on the ark.
    While plants were becoming re-established and diversifying, how would the plant-eating species have stayed alive and bred a large enough population to sustain the carnivores, and what would these plants have evolved from?

  7. There are approximately 250,000 different species of plant known today. This would require an average of 40 new species every year, yet in the last 200 years, we have only seen a handful of new plant species evolve.
    How could plants have evolved so many different phyla, classes, orders, families and species in just 6000 years?

  8. Many species of herbivore, such as the Australian koala and many species of butterfly, are specialised in their feeding habits and only eat a small number of plant species.
    What did they eat whilst waiting for their preferred food plant to evolve or how did they evolve their specialised digestive systems so quickly once their food species had evolved?

  9. At current known rates of mutation in mitochondrial DNA (mDNA) mathematical models show that all humans share a common female ancestor who lived about 350,000 years ago. (Note, this does not imply the first humans arose from a single individual, only that we all share this common theoretical ancestor). For the observed diversity in mDNA to have arisen in just 6000 years, the rate of mutation in mDNA must have been several orders of magnitude higher in earlier times.
    What caused this very high rate and what cause it to slow down?

  10. There have been approximately 240 human generations in the last 6000 years (assuming a generation time of 25 years). There are approximately 6,700 different recognised languages spoken today, and very many extinct ones. This represents approximately well over 28 entirely new language arising on average every generation and yet we have no records of an entirely new one arising in recent history.
    How did these new languages arise spontaneously fully developed in earlier times at a rate at which two or more people could communicate in them?

I would welcome answers from leading exponents of Young Earth Creationism, especially those who earn a living lecturing others and who claim their explanation is better than science at explaining the observable facts.







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Sunday 5 December 2010

The Faith Fallacy

What’s so good about Faith?


Faith: The thing held most dearly and proudly by the ‘faithful’; the means by which the ‘faithful’ know things without evidence; the means by which no evidence is needed to believe in a god, the nature of gods, and that the things attributed to gods were indeed performed by them.

Faith: The knowledge of things not seen.

For a Christian, faith is the means by which they know with complete confidence that there is a god and a heaven and the ONLY way to get to Heaven is by acceptance of God’s son, Jesus and by following his teaching as revealed in the Bible which faith tells them was unquestionably either dictated by or at least inspired by the god in Heaven.

Faith is also the means by which Christians know with absolute confidence that all the other religions are wrong.

For a Moslem, faith is the means by which they know with complete confidence that there is a god and a heaven and the ONLY way to get to Heaven is by acceptance that Mohammed was the last prophet of that god and wrote a book with clear and concise instructions which must be followed without question.

Faith is also the means by which Muslims know with absolute confidence that all the other religions are wrong.

For a Jew, faith is the means by which they know with complete confidence that there is a god and a heaven and the ONLY way to get to Heaven is by following the laws and rules as revealed by God to Moses, Elijah and other prophets and which include strict dietary rules, dress codes and observance of special days when life is lived differently to normal days.

Faith is also the means by which Jews know with absolute confidence that all the other religions are wrong.

For a Sikh... but you're probably getting bored by now and have recognised a pattern here.

But hold on! If faith is telling different people completely contradictory things and leading them to mutually exclusive conclusions, how can it be the sure and certain way to know the truth?

Clearly it can't, so what good is faith as a measure of physical reality, or even of mystical ‘transcendent reality’?

Let’s do a little mind experiment.

Imagine you’re the unfortunate victim of mistaken identity and find yourself in a court of law, charged with some offence or other of which you are completely innocent. Your defence team has brought in expert witnesses who have presented undeniable scientific evidence showing that, not only could you not have committed the crime, but you weren’t even in the same town at the time the offence was committed.

Well, that’s just about clinched it, hasn't it? Innocence proved beyond a shadow of a doubt. Case dismissed! Phew! I expect you’re wondering why you were ever prosecuted in the first place. And you WOULD be so acquitted in a society in which guilt or innocence is decided by a rational examination of evidence and logically deduced conclusions from that examination.

Imagine now you live in a society which holds that faith is a superior form of knowledge; that faith is a sure and certain way to determine the truth. So sure and certain in fact that evidence is regarded as inferior and not to be trusted, especially when it contradicts faith; a society which is, in fact, founded on good Christian, Islamic and/or Jewish principles; principles which were used to justify the society having that form in the first place. A society founded on the faith of the faithful.

The prosecution have put up a witness who has sworn on a holy book that he has faith that you are guilty. He freely admits he has no evidence but explains that his faith is strong; he has no doubt at all that you are guilty because this has been revealed to him by faith. Since faith is superior to evidence as a measure of reality, the jury should ignore the defence evidence and go with faith. In fact, he argues, it would show a lack of faith amounting to heresy to believe mere scientific evidence in the face of strong faith. So weak is mere evidence compared to faith that he did not look for it nor at the defence evidence. He had no need. His faith is strong.  The jury should understand, as good followers of the faith, that all the so-called defence 'evidence' shows is just how misleading science is and why it should not be trusted... and anyone who doesn't see that is showing suspiciously heretical arrogance and is betraying the oath they swore when they entered the jury box...

Who would you want the jury to believe?

Suddenly faith is not so reliable after all. Faith can lead to completely wrong conclusions. Faith can convict the innocent and free the guilty. Faith can lead to wrong being mistaken for right.

Faith can lead the faithful to convict those with the 'wrong' faith of being unfaithful...

That’s why the same process of faith leads Christians, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, and all the other religions, and every different sect to conclude that they, and they alone, are right and all the others are wrong.

Faith is a trap set to catch the unwary. It was invented by religious leaders because they had no evidence.  Had they had real evidence, you can be sure they would be forever trumpeting that fact and citing it at every opportunity. Children the world over would be herded in droves to see this wonderful evidence. "There's your reason to believe", the priests would shout. "You don't need 'faith'! We have the evidence!"

Faith is not a virtue; faith is unquestioning obedience to dogma, and that is a sin.

To believe through faith alone is to make the assumption that something MUST be true just because you believe it. The arrogance of that belief would be breathtaking if the notion of faith had not poisoned our culture to the extent that this arrogance is considered an admirable quality; that being ‘faithful’ is assumed to equate to being good.

Faith is the trick by which the unscrupulous control the credulous and gullible, and make people ashamed and guilty for having doubt and asking questions.

Faith is the means by which Jewish, Islamic, Christian and other religion’s clerics and theologians have sought to exercise control and hold back human cultural, ethical and scientific development to a level it attained in the Bronze Age, at the nomadic pastoralist stage, when the myths and superstitions were first written down.

Faith is the means by which charlatans seek to prevent us asking the questions and accepting the answers which would break their grip on society.

Faith is the mind-numbing toxin of the religion parasite, in all it's different varieties.

Do not have faith in faith for that way leads to insanity.





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Friday 5 November 2010

On Omniscience and Freewill

Despite my blog exposing the logical fallacy of an inerrantly omniscient god and free will, it seems the full implications of this have gone unnoticed by many.

Let’s recap:

We are discussing the god of the Bible which Christians, Jews and Moslem all regard as omniscient (all-knowing) and whom they believe has granted mankind free will.

Following from this is the idea that, by exercising this free will, mankind committed the ultimate sin of disobeying God and must now seek God’s forgiveness. God does not pre-ordain our decisions so we bear sole responsibility for our own actions and are accountable to God for them. At the same time, God is all knowing and inerrant and so knows everything with absolute certainty. He knows everything about the past, present and future and is never wrong, ever.

Christians, Jews and Muslims and their various sects all believe they alone know the special secrets for gaining this god’s forgiveness for this supposed supreme sin of disobeying God. The only way to achieve this is by joining them, accepting their dogmas and following their rituals.

Furthermore, mankind knows about this sin, about God’s inerrant omniscience, about mankind’s free will and about the need for forgiveness, because it’s all written down in a book either written by, dictated by or inspired by this inerrant (and perfect) god, so it too is inerrant and absolutely true.

Surprisingly though, a simple question which can be answered with a simple “yes” or “no” answer seems to put Christians, Jews and Muslims all into the same flat panic.

The simple question is:

Saturday 23 October 2010

On Quantum Cats and Future History

Hold onto your hat. This could get a little rough.

At the heart of quantum mechanics lies a paradox. All experimentation has shown that a particle has a dual nature - the so-called quantum duality. It is, at the same time, a particle or 'quanta' of energy, and a wave. It has been shown that a single photon, fired at two slits in a screen, passes through both slits simultaneously and creates an interference pattern with itself on a photosensitive detector behind the slits. And it's not just two slits. The same effect will be seen with three, four, five slits or as many slits as you like.

Furthermore, it has also been shown that, when we try to observe a particle on its journey through the two slits, by placing a detector behind one of them, the interference pattern disappears and the particle behaves like a perfectly respectable single entity and passes dutifully through the slit with the detector and not through the other one.

Observation has (apparently) caused the waveform to collapse into a particle. Seemingly, our observation of it has changed the nature of reality with respect to the particle being observed and it now only has one future.

The conclusion is inescapable, even if a little disturbing. All particles have many futures, possibly infinitely many futures, and they all take all of them.

The experimental data showing the collapse of the wave into a single future by our observation of it has also lead some people to conclude that somehow we create reality by detecting it, even leading some to speculate that there was no reality until mankind was there to observe it.

This conclusion is the 'Copenhagen Interpretation' of quantum duality and has lead to the multiverse hypothesis, where all possible universes, representing all possible futures potentially co-exist but we determine which one by our observation.

Cue, Schrödinger's Cat.

In an attempt to repudiate this view, Erwin Schrödinger devised a thought experiment in which a live cat is placed in a sealed box, with air, food and water, and a phial of cyanide linked to a device which breaks it, so killing the cat, on detecting a particle emitted by a single atom of a radioactive isotope.

In this system, the cat's future is inevitably linked to a single quantum event - a radioactive decay - which is purely random and independent of any other event. The future of the isotope is either decayed or not and the future of the cat is either alive or dead. However, since the emitted particle will exist simultaneously in both possible futures, and the isotope will thus be both decayed and not decayed at the same time, so the cat will be simultaneously both alive and dead.

However, if the Copenhagen Interpretation is correct, this paradox will only be resolved when we open the box and observe the state of the isotope. Only then will the cat's future be determined; until that point, according Copenhagen, the cat will be both dead and alive.

This, of course, is a highly anthropocentric view of reality and assumes that observation is a uniquely human ability. In fact, it's naive. 'Observation' is carried out by detecting the effect(s) of a particle interacting with one or more other particles. Observation is witnessing the effects of quantum entanglement, when the future of one particle becomes entangled with that of another, and this has been happening since the beginning of time regardless of whether humans were present to witness it or not.

Schrödinger had intended his thought experiment to show the illogicality of the Copenhagen Interpretation but it failed to do that. What it lead people to conclude is that we discover which future we are in when we observe reality. When we open the box we discover whether we are in a future in which the cat is alive, or one in which it is dead. The multiverse hypothesis is not scratched by Schrödinger's cat.

The late, great Richard Feynman, working at Caltech, went some way towards resolving this problem. He showed that all possible histories with respect to a single particle can be expressed as a probability distribution expressing the 'sum over histories' and that this distribution is the wave we see when we observe the wave nature of a quantum event.

He has also shown that for complex systems, these waves 'decohere' to produce what may be a single future. This apparently refutes the multiverse hypothesis, but it may not do. It is still possible to view the future histories of small objects like atoms and molecules as having multiple possible futures because we know they, like particles, take all possible paths through spacetime. It could be that decoherence occurs only above a certain level of complexity.

The largest objects which have been shown to pass simultaneously through both slits in a two slit experiment are molecules of buckminsterfullerene (C60) consisting of sixty carbon atoms arranged in a geodesic - the dome-shaped structures designed by the architect Buckminster Fuller. Sixty atoms is large for inorganic molecules but still quite small for organic molecules, and many orders of magnitude smaller than an organism such as a cat, dead or alive. And we know that if we throw a dead cat at a couple of slots in a wall, it won't go through both, don't we? In fact, unless our aim is good, it'll most likely go through neither and we'll see the dead cat bounce.

So what do we make of this? Small objects have many possible futures, yet larger objects have only one - and we don't yet know where the dividing line is...

Rosa's speculation:
It could also be that what we see as 'now' is an advancing front of decoherence as we move into an array of futures. That NOW is only the interface between our macro-reality and micro-futures operating at the quantum level.




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Tuesday 5 October 2010

The Joy of Living

The Joy of Living - although this was not the last song Ewan MacColl wrote, it was meant as a farewell to the world and to the people he loved.

Farewell you northern hills, you mountains all goodbye
Moorlands and stony ridges, crags and peaks goodbye
Glyder Fach farewell, Culbeg, Scafell, cloud bearing Suilven
Sun warmed rocks and the cold of Bleaklow's frozen sea
The snow and the wind and the rain of hills and mountains
Days in the sun and the tempered wind and the air like wine
And you drink and you drink till you’re drunk on the joy of living

Farewell to you my love, my time is almost done
Lie in my arms once more until the darkness comes
You filled all my days, held the night at bay, dearest companion
Years pass by and they're gone with the speed of birds in flight
Our lives like the verse of a song heard in the mountains
Give me your hand and love and join your voice with mine
And we'll sing of the hurt and the pain and the joy of living

Farewell to you my chicks, soon you must fly alone
Flesh of my flesh, my future life, bone of my bone
May your wings be strong, may your days be long, safe be your journey
Each of you bears inside of you the gift of love
May it bring you light and warmth and the pleasure of giving
Eagerly savour each new day and the taste of its mouth
Never lose sight of the thrill and the joy of living

Take me to some high place of heather, rock and ling
Scatter my dust and ashes, feed me to the wind
So that I may be part of all you see, the air you are breathing
I'll be part of the curlew's cry and the soaring hawk
The blue milkwort and the sundew hung with diamonds
I'll be riding the gentle wind that blows through your hair
Reminding you how we shared in the joy of living

© Ewan MacColl Ltd 1986. Black And White

Ewan MacColl, whom I had the pleasure of meeting twice, spending a great couple of evenings with him and his partner Peggy Seeger, died in 1989, aged 74.

more info : http://www.ewanmaccoll.com/
www.dickgaughan.co.uk/chain/ewan-maccoll.html





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