Richard Dawkins meets Stephen Colbert

Film at 11:30.

Maturity & Losing God

Suresh blogs about giving up on the God myth as a mark of intellectual and emotional maturity.

Bayer Sells batch of HIV-Infected Hemophilia Drug on International Market?

Holy fuck.

Now, to de-sensationalize from American media: South Africa's Department of Health's announcement on this.

Which still leaves me with an exasperated "holy fuck!"

Lay turns to God and family after guilty verdict

Before the verdict:

Lay then bowed his head, eyes closed, and appeared to pray as the eight-woman, four-man jury entered the courtroom to deliver the verdicts that could send him to prison for the rest of his life.

After the verdict:

God's got another plan right now," Lay could be heard telling each of his five children and other family members.

Perhaps, the notion of having a personal relationship with God lead Mr. Lay into this. I mean, when you believe in a interventionist supernatural being who actually listens to you, doesn't it become dangerously easy to justify good fortune as rewards from God.

The professional American athlete who defers the crowd's applause to God by pointing to the sky from the end zone after scoring a touchdown–isn't he actually claiming that his actions were preferential treatment from God, as though God really likes certain NFL teams and players over others? Seen that way, it's not at all the act of humility and deference that a player might believe it to be.

It's difficult to be objective about oneself already. Believing that there is a God who gets involved with your personal events easily lends itself to believing that your privileges in life show how God perhaps sees you as a little bit better. From there, it becomes a slippery slope to rationalizing one's own transgressions.

Perhaps God doesn't have any plan for you at all, Mr. Lay. Perhaps you are just another one of the rest of us who happened to be in an extremely fortunate position that allowed you to justify your deeply aggregious transgressions.

George Hrab CD’s Available Online

I discovered a tweaked-out musician named George Hrab from the skepticality podcast. His influences are some of my favorite artists, and his music generally has a scientific/skeptical angle, so how could I not get some of his work?

I found his disks are available online, then I noticed that the order process has the following step:

Any special instructions, comments, or questions? Gift-wrapping or a personal card? Tell us now!

So naturally, I made a request:

Please put a couple stickers with crudely drawn smiley faces on the back of each jewel case. The stickers can be on the cellophane, but please make sure the smiley faces are only one the back. Extra credit for work done in color.

Then I read this:

(There's almost no request we can't handle, so feel free to ask, OK?)

So I added:

Also, if you would include a note that says: "Dear Reverend Ted: It's about damn time that you bought these. Way to keep a girl waiting. I mean, really! –George Hrab" Extra credit for having Mssr Hrab actually sign the note.

Thinking about it further, I realized that these requests which I previously thought might seem absurd were actually not that challenging at all…

Finally, if you would include a picture of Mssr Hrab dressed in drag and standing on a street corner holding his thumb out as though he were hitching a ride, it would be totally hot. I mean H-O-T. Hot. Thanks.

I'll let you know outcome.

Kate Moss, Michael Jackson,

Okay, the whole Kate Moss cocaine hullabaloo incites me to comment on how we make our heroes. Something of the shock over the incident seems very contrived. It smells the same to me as the outrage over the indiscretions for which Michael Jackson was accused. It's unfortunate that so many are as gullible as to accept simply and unquestioningly the personalities that are marketed to us.

Even though I'm still just a leaf on my family tree, I'll indulge in some hubris: here are some ideas for raising children.

• Teach your kids how to question the world that well-funded marketing efforts push at them .
• Teach them the concept of "hegemony" and how the ideas of the powerful few are manufactured into the ideas of the masses.
• Teach them how to ask critical questions, like, "Who benefits from this?" and "Is this person/place/thing really as important as I am being told it is?"
• Delineate a difference between "fame" and "greatness," and teach them to select heroes who selflessly instill inspiration rather than are just good at self-promotion.
• Spread the meme of skepticism. But also be sure to show how being skeptical does not equal being cynical

At first, I was really disturbed about how much media attention was put on the Michael Jackson case. I saw it as pandering to ratings and media sensationalism about something that should be just another court case. But somewhere in the process, I think while it was being covered on NPR, I an epiphany that turned me around on it. The media coverage exposed how irrational people became in the presence of fame. ("Sure you can sleep over at a middle-aged man's house, son!") And maybe seeing that made some people see the larger picture: that our adulation of the famous is often misplaced, and sometimes can do genuine harm to regular people.

The LiveScience article to which I linked this entry questions whether people really look up to Kate Moss as a role model. On the basic level, I agree with their assertion that no one really does. But on a grander scale, a great many people do in fact weirdly translate "fame" to mean "superior." So this whole Kate Moss thing is just one small example of how engrossed we become in undue cults of personality.

Update: Joined the Skeptic Webring–Rejected

Rejected [If you know the Rancid song, hum along]:
I tried to join the Skeptic Webring. Although I had browsed through some of its linked sites many times, it took a recent "well, duh!" moment for me to realize that I can be just as pompous as the next skeptic, so why not put this blog on it? Well, as you can see from the reply below, my content is apparently not abundantly skeptical, or the reviewer was skeptical about the abundance of skepticism. Personally, I think it's because I took Michael Shermer to task in my review of How We Believe. If I were him, I would have rejected the site more for being abusively tedious. But, what are you gonna do?

Here's a contribution:
For any skeptics that stumble across me through the ring, here is yet another way to find cool web content:

1. Get the Mozilla Firefox browser. You can use this button:
2. Get the StumbleUpon plugin. (Tools –> Extensions –> Get more Extensions) This requires you to restart your browser.
3. Set up a Stumbler account.
4. Set your preferences to include things like atheism, consciousness, etc
5. Enjoy stumbling upon new sites with the "Stumble!" button.

Et viola, you can now find cool stuff that the serious web surfers with your interests have already stumbled upon.

Afterthought:
Eventually, I may take off the webring link below. I leave it up for now, since I bear no hard feelings whatsoever about the heartless and cruelly cursory rejection I received. None at all.

Bush and the Grand Obfuscation

If God had meant for us to believe in Intelligent Design, he would have given us an actual theory to study for it. ID offers no theory other than "we don't know how it's possible, so only God could have done it."

Unfortunately, President Bush does not understand what a scientific theory is. Of course, the distinction is unimportant to the President. He got to where he is not by demonstrating worldly knowledge, but on being aligned with his voting constituency for his political support. Even if he knew the distinction, it would be politically unfavorable to clarify it. So, obfuscation it is.

Nevertheless, I think that we should teach Intelligent Design. It could be a great tool for teaching critical thinking. But to get this Darwinian's backing, we have to agree on these terms here.

–Rev

Modern Chinese Water Torture

I lost my employee badge recently, so yeserday I finally went to get it replaced. The security office is out in one of the older 1980's era buildings, in a windowless room with several video monitors of cameras panning different sections of the Provo campus. When I got to the door (solid, no windows, of course), I could hear rock music of some sort playing inside.

I knocked. Then, I knocked a little louder. When the lone security guy opened and let me in. As he made my badge, I found the source of the music. The guy had Fox News on, playing perhaps only slightly louder than it needed to be. What I had heard had been the exciting music of some commercial.

Now, imagine being locked in a windowless room with Fox News for eight hours a day. If it didn't drive you mad, it would have to reconfigure how your mind works. Perhaps Steven Pinker should look into this.

Soon, the program was back on, with some terrorism expert being interviewed about yesterday's second bombing attempts in London. Most of the dialog centered around the Fox News guy asking many pressing questions about how extremely unsafe the world is and the need for a stronger police state. At the bottom of the screen in large letters was a simple segment title: "Terror in London." (As opposed to using a more emotionally-neutral "Terrorism in London.")

It took a while for the badge making machine to warm up, so I suffered through to the next commercial break. First commercial? WWE profressional wrestling. So I pointed out to the guy that perhaps if professional wrestling advertisments target the viewing audience of your news channel, then there could be a parallel between the two different media. He smiled and sort of acknowledged what I had said without taking any visible offense.

Maybe Fox News should have some kind of Sugeon General's warning. "Prolonged exposure can lead to unhealthy levels of credulity and destroy your natural defense systems that rely on healthy skepticism."

How We Believe, Shermer’s Great Capitulation

I recently finished listening to Michael Shermer's How We Believe, read by Dr. Shermer himself, provided by my preferred audiobook source, Audible.com.

This is not Shermer's best work. While it does have Shermer's familiar, conversational-if-almost-rambling style (which I find an acceptable voice for Shermer's chosen line of inquiry) and while I very much enjoyed his previous Why People Believe Weird Things (which perhaps more exposed the gamut of weird things that people believe than explained the actual why of why people believe them), this particular book fails to make any kind of strong stand. Like Weird Things, Shermer's How We Believe wanders through a gauntlet of subjects within a fairly well controlled domain, and it is thematically cohesive. But as one reads it, a problematic issue starts to emerge, an inconsistency with the general body of Shermer's work that I cannot reconcile.

As the founder (?) of the Skeptic Society and Editor of Skeptic magazine, Shermer seems one of the most profound of adherents to the philosophy of science: that doubt is a healthy universal, and that evidence should always trump conjecture. But in How We Believe, Shermer seems to be trying to toe an unexpected line in which he cedes ground to religion by claiming that science and religion are actually two very different ways of "knowing." He also declares himself to be an agnostic, which seems inconsistent with his line of reasoning in his other works. (Perhaps this book predates his others…bad me, I did not check that.)

Those who follow my personal blog will know that I don't unequivocate about whether I believe in God. I see such belief as anti-scientific: it requires faith in a claim for which all presented evidence could easily support many other conclusions. (There is just as much evidence for flying reindeer and forty-foot, purple apes. Oh, Grape Ape, how we miss you.) So when Shermer declares his agnosticism, it seems to me like a namby-pamby, noncommital way to retain more readers. Unfortunately for Shermer, his audience is by nature skeptical…that's why they're his audience. So how can a person claim himself a skeptic, and still leave room for indecision on such an outrageous, unsubstantiated claim as the existence of a divine creator for the entire universe? Does not the very definition of "skeptic" deem necessary the exclusion of such claims without solid substantiation? Does that mean that one can be agnostic about flying reindeer?

In the book, Shermer also describes correspondence with several members of the skeptic society who claim a similar agnostic worldview. So, there are perhaps many of them—I have absolutley no doubt about Shermer's integrity (and I should hope that no one takes my criticism as me impuning Dr. Shermer in such a way). From my experience with him as a speaker and writer, he is an absolutely forthright and consciencious human being. But I do question his approach to this particular work. Did he soften his position in order to appeal to a broader audience? Or, does his skeptical worldview somehow still allow him to permit supernatural claims for which he cannot find directly refuting evidence?

How We Believe covers a lot of ground about belief systems without ever really addressing the how bit–it probably should have been called What we Believe. Some of it is well-balanced inquiry, some interesting factual background, and some of it the familiar kind of material that Shermer so often covers in his lectures and written works. If you seek to understand commonalties between disparate religions–perhaps what makes Buddhism, Islam, and animistic worldviews tick—this work will leave you unsatisfied. However, if you are looking to add information and soft opinion on the general topic of 'how we believe,' Shermer's work provides the usual good insights in an entertaining format.