Green thought, in a green shade,
Green views
The Watermelon Blog 
Green on the outside, social justice inside
"We can do better" (Kennedy)
Richest fluency
"This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body." Walt Whitman
The Goodies
good television
good movies
good books
good poetry
more good books
good songs
good children
good boys
good people
good leaders
Try a lucky dip:
"Well it looks to me as if the whole heaven of the world is on fire now."
"landscape that had been farmed for 2000 years or more but had retained some biodiversity and variety."
"So now there are calls for children in schools to be only taught that nuclear power is good for you."
"One of those human-animal hybrids reared its head again the other day and said "Moooo"."
"If you want people to be always under control then simply abolish the concept of "private", and it will get rid of those silly philosophical arguments between teenagers on the meaning of life and the concept of identity."
"if you had to choose one person who is most responsible for the failure of governments, particularly the American and Australian governments, to act over the last critical ten years, Rupert Murdoch is your man."
"Now, for the first time we have a literally Earth-changing event, the effects of CO2 increase on the climate of the whole planet."
"The falseness of this argument is easy to spot because it is proposed by people who have never ever conceded that anything else Aborigines did was of any value."
"Lesser humans may look on aghast, as elections are fixed, opposition parties destroyed one way or another, lies told, courts and the boards of public bodies stacked with zealots, the media starved of information, laws broken, constitutions ignored, democracy trashed."
"In protests everywhere young people literally hug trees, believing, it seems, that there is some quality to a tree which allows a mystical connection with humans."
"Wow, I thought, Peter Costello has looked up from his "tax breaks for the rich spreadsheet" for a moment and smelled the carbon dioxide."
"the inability to do a Google search and instantly find an answer to a question you are pretending doesn't have an answer sure makes even a simple country boy put one flagellum with another flagellum to make three flagellae."
"these religious fundamentalists who spread the enormously damaging creationist propaganda, inflicting a kind of mental terrorism on schools, should also be on "no fly lists"."
"While most of us saw the dangers ahead for the only planet we can live on, representatives of the nuclear power industry, and their tame scientists, saw only a marketing opportunity."
"The ones who could express that love of country through creating art were lucky, but the others who came along to see it were part of that same community spirit."
"I wonder if John Howard has phoned any of his old high school teachers to say thank you for an Australian education?"
"The problem does not lie with the Iraqi people but with the fact that they have been invaded and occupied."
"before you can say "red sky at night, shepherd's delight", there will be the usual nonsensical calls for more and more dams to be built, or for rivers to be turned inland."
"I was again struck with the reality of how badly served are farmers by the leaders of the farmers' organisations."
"They are people who saw Orwells "1984" not as a warning but as a manual."
"Such approaches would certainly be much more productive, and much less damaging than a mistaken belief in the value and benign nature of "prescribed burning"."
"The strong element of belief is dangerous in science as in religion because it prevents people seeing things."
"Will the minister be happy when only 15 percent of Australians accept that humans evolved on this planet, or does he have a still lower figure in mind?"
"well, someone is going to make money out of the destruction of the planet and it might as well be me."
"The combination of course let Pauline Hanson and her shadowy backers and wacky supporters off the leash and the rest is history."
"It would be hard to see any politician arguing against the need for big business to be more accountable to the community that supports it."
"Add into the mix the shockjocks on radio and television shamelessly promoting prejudice and whipping up emotions."
"brown snake bodies wrapped around them."
"Grasslands grow where they do because of combinations such as poor soils, flat lands, high temperatures and low rainfall, they are not areas where Aboriginal burning removed forests."
"It is also often claimed that Australian ecosystems are adapted to fire. This is a bit like saying that lawns are adapted to lawnmowers."
"The business community, with the governments help, is about to send us back to those horse and buggy days of employers ruling the world."
"All care will be taken, they promise, qualified pharmacists running them."
"How could you let them subsume the economy and international interests of Australia into the interests of the Republican Party of the USA"
"but where are my slippers"
"then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies."
"I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators."
"Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey"
"a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party."
"the evening star is coming."
"You might at least try to avoid the proposition that if there is a perceived conflict between business and "the environment" that there is no question but that the thing which goes is the environment."
"There may well be people who have a spiritual dimension to their feelings about forests, just as there are people who have a spiritual dimension to feelings about V8 cars or Collingwood football."
" the only thing the market is good at, the only thing it is really for, is taking care of business, and it does that very well."
" let us not go rushing into this religious stuff until we see if there is anything science can't explain."
" Remember Iraq. Remember the flowers that weren't strewn on the streets for the invading armies."
" we have to work with the effects of the "progress" that has been made since Ned Ludd and his merry band were smashing the new fangled weaving machines. Go Ned, I want to say."
" Hard to tell how long the eruptions of the religion plague will last, and what damage they will do."
" Greenhouse temperature rise is a massive refutation of the proposition that the world should be run by businessmen for businessmen."
" We are pulling up the drawbridge against the peasants."
" People in areas prone to bushfires are usually advised to develop an escape plan or action plan which includes having, in easily transportable form, the core possessions you want to survive."
" most of our members were probably Methodists, it being as hard to imagine teetotal Catholics and Anglicans as it was to imagine a drunken Methodist."
" he is playing , like the grasshopper, in the warm sun of high resource prices and plenty of tourists, what happens when the prices collapse and winter comes and the tourists do not?"
" as after walking all that way I think I am capable of looking after myself."
" They can be brought out onto the streets to have some rather odd laws three thousand years old put into their courthouses."
" Hard to tell how long the eruptions of the religion plague will last, and what damage they will do."
" Greenhouse temperature rise is a massive refutation of the proposition that the world should be run by businessmen for businessmen."
" We are pulling up the drawbridge against the peasants."
" People in areas prone to bushfires are usually advised to develop an escape plan or action plan which includes having, in easily transportable form, the core possessions you want to survive."
" most of our members were probably Methodists, it being as hard to imagine teetotal Catholics and Anglicans as it was to imagine a drunken Methodist."
" he is playing , like the grasshopper, in the warm sun of high resource prices and plenty of tourists, what happens when the prices collapse and winter comes and the tourists do not?"
" as after walking all that way I think I am capable of looking after myself."
" They can be brought out onto the streets to have some rather odd laws three thousand years old put into their courthouses."
Strange
Bedfellows
John Howard
Kevin Rudd
Al Gore
George Bush
Malcolm Turnbull
Leon Trotsky
Thomas Huxley
Oliver Goldsmith
Kurt Vonnegut
Tony Blair
Samuel Pepys
Winston Churchill
Peter Costello
Joan of Arc
Fidel Castro
Sarah Williams
Peter Beattie
Ned Ludd
De-Anne Kelly
Barack Obama
Kylie Minogue
Tony Abbott
Alexander Downer
Barbaro
Sam Kekovich
Alan Bennett
Osama bin Laden
Rupert Murdoch
George Lakoff
Bjorn Lomborg
Adolf Hitler
Ayn Rand
George Orwell
Julia Butterfly Hill
Saddam Hussein
James Carville
Charles Darwin
Philip Cooney
Jacky Kelly
Irshad Manji
James Lovelock
Bob Hawke
Brendon Nelson
Barnaby Joyce
Robert Menzies
Robert Tressell
Slim Dusty
Noel Coward
Samuel Johnson
Walt Whitman
Edmund Hillary
Robert Byrd
Phillip Adams
Alisa Camplin
Arnold Schwarzeneger
Blogger's Cut
Best slices from the watermelon
Future to the back
Ox power
Whacko Texas
Ticked off
Inhaling the Sixties
God unwilling
Bakers Oven 5
Game over
All change for
Dog bites man
Whale tears
Flowers for bosses
Curtin spinning
Gotta love it
Dodgy intelligence
A glass darkly
Truth and consequences
Media-ocrity
Cant get me Im part of the society
Growing like woody weeds in the nanny state
Soul brother?
You know the old saying - there is no such thing as "alternative medicine", only medicine that works and medicine that doesn't work. Here is a new one - there is no such thing as "spirituality", just rational brain function and irrational brain function.Where did that come from? Well I grow weary of being told by the religiously inclined that atheism is irrational because it doesn't take into account spirituality or the soul. Then they will sit back, satisfied smile briefly playing around their lips, content to have proved, yet again, that they are rational human beings. And that atheists are lunatics who should be at best excluded from all public office and at worst simply lined up against the wall and shot.
Problem is the proposition is simply a tautology signifying nothing. Why do we have religion? Because people have spiritual needs. How do we know they have spiritual needs? Because they have religion. So there. We have religion because we have religion.
There is no separate entity called a soul, nor a separate human attribute which can be labelled as spirituality. Both are just the sum total of all our mental processes and the inputs into them over the course of our lives. It is just another example of the old mind-body debate. What is the mind - it is the brain, what else would it be, the liver? Once upon a time of course it was assumed that human essence was in the heart - which retains its popular status as the seat of love. Does anyone seriously still believe that your love for someone is a function of heart activity?
And yet we go on, mindlessly claiming that there is some separate and invisible human organ called the soul which expresses something never measured called spirituality. And we use these invisible features to pretend that they prove that an equally invisible feature of the world called "god" also exists. God created humans with souls. How do we know that? Because we are spiritual beings. How do we know that? Because we follow religions that believe there is a god. Why do we do that? Because we have souls. Oh and by the way, when all the actual human organs have stopped functioning, the soul beats on. An invisible organ life in an invisible life after death.
Really you couldn't invent this stuff. Oh, they already did?
Only rational thought on The Watermelon Blog.
15 August 2008
Category Religion
0 comments
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"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)
I see dead people
There I was, nearly having a near death experience the other day. Became intimately acquainted with intimations of mortality. They say there are no atheists on operating tables, but there I was, putting my trust in a competent surgeon and hundreds of years of science and medical technology rather than the spaghetti monster, and I seemed to get by alright. No bolt of lightning plunging the room into darkness or anything like that.But it got me thinking about thinking about death. A little while ago I had read one of those articles, the kind I must have read a thousand times, in which the punch line was "of course humans are the only animals that know about their own death" or words to that effect. But there, in a room that was a much less pleasant (and scarier) version of the Starship Enterprise bridge, I began to question this truism.
Humans the only animals that know about their own death? How do we know that? Not elephants, or whales, or gorillas, or dolphins, or chimps, or bears, or pigs? Are we sure? Mourning (including dogs for their human owners) by birds and mammals for lost or dead young ones, lost friends, is a sure sign of awareness of death and its completeness. How do we know that the understanding of death as loss does not extend to the individual elephant or gorilla being aware that its time must come? Why would it not?
No, I think this is yet another attempt by humans to assert their own superiority, their own separateness from the rest of the animal kingdom from which some are so reluctant to understand we evolved. At various times humans have been said to be different to animals (that is, all animals) because of tool-using, the presence of two brain hemispheres, the ability to feel pain, an opposable thumb, language use. None of these hold up after further study (even chickens, it has been found, have separate brain hemispheres) and so the religious among us now come down to just the knowledge that the bell tolls for all of us as proof of our superiority. More wishful thinking.
In fact it seems to me that knowledge of death is more advanced among animal species. The behavior exhibited by many animal species when a member of their family group dies or is killed suggests that they know for a fact that death has a sting, that it is forever, and that the bones that are eventually all that remains of a once loved mother or baby are indeed all that remains.
Religious humans, on the other hand, don't understand that they will die. They refuse to use the word die, but speak of someone "passing", of being "reunited" with previously dead family members, of being resurrected (whatever that might mean). We don't pass, by the way, we D.I.E, and we won't be seeing anyone over the other side - I'm sure the animals know that. So perhaps that is the ultimate difference between animals and humans. All animals know that death is final. Some humans fool themselves with talk of life after death. Needs a bit more evolution, old Homo sapiens, to start seeing the world as it really is - a matter of life and death.
Some people think the Watermelon Blog is a matter of life and death, but it's much more serious than that.
death
30 July 2008
Category Religion
1 comments
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"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)
Bring on the secular advisers
I see that Kevin Rudd seems to have acquired another "spiritual adviser". Seems to me that given that this Labor government is even more infused with religiosity than the Howard government was (and there is a sentence I never thought I would be writing), the last thing Kevin needs is a "spiritual adviser". No, what he needs is a secular adviser. Someone who could tell him to ease back when he is about to make his third fulsome speech to the Pope. Someone to explain why the public shouldn't be funding religious schools. Someone to tell him that all virtue doesn't stem from religious teaching. Someone to explain that the concept of "god" is ancient mythology, not reality.We now have the most ostentatiously religious leader this country has ever seen. Kevin's church attendance is on a par with that of George Bush and Tony Blair. In both those cases, and that of the Howard government, we have seen a potent mix of ideology and religiosity applied to policy, with outcomes that have not been to the benefit of the three countries concerned. It would be good if Australia didn't keep on down that route, but reverted to a secular country in which science and rational decision making prevailed.
I'm happy to volunteer to be Kevin's secular adviser. I see it as something like the role of the Court Jester or "Fool" in courts who were the only ones allowed to tell the King the truth. To whisper in his ear when he was getting above himself. To provide a cold dose of sanity to people who tought they were god's representatives on Earth. I could wear motley, if desired, for the right price.
spiritual
27 July 2008
Category Religion
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"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)
Just Imagine More
I have been inspired this week by the Pope's visit and World Youth Day with its "pilgrims" (any ladies from Bath among them I wonder, and where is our Geoffrey Chaucer?) and his renaming of Australia as the "Great Southern Land of the Holy Spirit" (going to take a miracle to fit that on to a coin or stamp). But most of all I have been inspired by the Federal and State governments coughing up $200 million for this event and not even asking for a cut of the profits from the tee shirts and other tasteful tourist souvenirs. So I have gone into full scale planning for World Atheist Day to be held in Canberra 25 July 2010 (Xmas in July, in the year of the ETS, take that Dr Pell), and have renamed the country Terra Incognita in anticipation. Having made those announcements I can sit back at my keyboard and wait (I already have a cat to comfort me), confidently assuming that Kevin and Morris will have put my cheques in the mail and I can get on with booking the plane for Richard Dawkins who will be coming to run the event (and hopefully rename the country back to Terra Australis), and get tee shirts with the Great Spaghetti Monster on them made in China.I also confidently assume that while all the happy smiling young atheists, guitars slung over their shoulders in case they want to spontaneously burst into the singing of "Imagine" are here, laws will be passed banning any display of religiosity anywhere in Canberra. No religious clothing, no religious singing in the centre of town, no passing out of pamphlets, no churches with silly slogans on notice boards, no use of the word "redemption" in sporting broadcasts. I get annoyed by these things, and I expect not to get annoyed during World Atheist Day. Or someone is going to pay for it - I want fines consisting of a tithe of all the money made by the church in WYD. A sort of Religiosity Tax on Pellamisms, which should work, hopefully, like a Carbon Tax on emissions.
The event planning is under way. I see it as a kind of Unbelievers Olympics. The initial event might be the race to cast the first stone. Followed by the "populate or perish" three legged race for mixed doubles (wearing uniforms with the slogan - "kiss me I'm an atheist"). There would be a "describe the McKillop miracle" competition for imaginative writing, and the fast eating competition - by candlelight. Catering would be no problem - my pilgrims will be fed carp, enough carp to feed five thousand, on the shores of Lake Burley Griffin.
My only worry is that I can't seem to tie Mr Rudd down to a firm date on which to begin casting out superstition from Australia as fast as snakes were cast out from Ireland. I told him about the photo op when Richard Dawkins arrives at the airport accompanied only (he is a modest man, Saint Richard, once a member of the boy scouts, practically compulsory in England in his youth, apparently) by an entourage of one of Dr Who's assistants, but he muttered something about the religious vote, and someone called Fielding. He also apparently can't see why we need to cast out superstitions quite so quickly - half by 2050 he thought was enough, and in any case, most of them could just be buried rather than removed entirely.
So the way ahead looks stony and hard, like the bed of the Murray River after global warming, but am I down-hearted, not me. There were those who thought that John Howard would rule as long as Robert Menzies, and that we would never sign the Kyoto Protocols, never again have a prime minister who wasn't an honorary member of the exclusive brethren, never again have television screens or streets free of Big Brother. But I know that faith can move mountains of coal, and that somewhere in the desert is a bush that can burn forever without consuming itself, constantly being renewed. Must be a metaphor in there somewhere.
But I digress. Back to the planning. The catholics seem not to have thought of this, but then they seem to be a bit set in their ways, seem to believe they are infallible or something. I think it's important not just to have teenagers involved in the great joy that is atheism, but to get the very young involved. World Atheist Day will have a special section for the Under Sevens, we could call them Dawkin's Youth. I always say if you give me a child until he is seven he will be an atheist for life. It might seem young, but I think you are never too young to learn to think for yourself, whatever the Young Liberals might say.
So all you atheists out there (the silent majority, I like to call you) start saving your Peter's Pence and booking your transport (fishing boats, I'm afraid, you won't be able to afford air fares by then, and it's not as if you have some rich organisation behind you). And if your mothers weep, and tell you not to go off on the crusade, tell them it's a bit like getting married where you are gaining a daughter not losing a son. In this case the movement of the atheists of the world to Canberra will see a great fall in the average IQ in cities around the world, and a great increase in the average IQ of Canberra. There may not be a big increase in financial wealth in Canberra as a result of World Atheist Day (though poor atheists, it is well known, having taken a vow of poverty, will inherit the Earth), but there will certainly be a huge increase in brain power. Mr Rudd could put them to work on global warming - could lead to a renewal of faith in renewables.
Note to readers - this is an extended version of the earlier post, written as a letter to a newspaper. For that purpose the essay need to be both short and rest on a single analogy. By contrast a 1000 word version for a blog can't get away with just piling on more and more detail about the analogy - "we get it already, boring, boring". So I had to extend it by adding another layer of meaning with a metaphor, helped by Cardinal Pell's climate change denialism and his demand for more and more children to be produced, which had come out just after I wrote the short version. Instead of replacing the earlier version with this Director's Cut I thought I would include both so that readers can compare the two approaches, and see, in this case at least, how an idea can develop.
religion
16 July 2008
Category Religion
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"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)
Just imagine
I have been inspired by the Pope's visit and World Youth Day with its "pilgrims" (where is our Geoffrey Chaucer?) and his renaming of Australia as the "Great Southern Land of the Holy Spirit" (going to take a miracle to fit that on to a coin or stamp). But most of all I have been inspired by the Federal and State governments coughing up $200 million for this event and not even asking for a cut of the profits from the tee shirts and other tasteful tourist souvenirs. So I have gone into full scale planning for World Atheist Day to be held in Canberra 25 July 2010 (Xmas in July). Having made that announcement I can confidently assume that Kevin and Morris will have put my cheques in the mail and I can get on with booking the plane for Richard Dawkins who will be coming to run the event (and hopefully rename the country back to Terra Australis), and get tee shirts with the Great Spaghetti Monster on them. I also confidently assume that while all the happy smiling young atheists, guitars slung over their shoulders in case they want to spontaneously burst into the singing of "Imagine" are here, laws will be passed banning any display of religiosity anywhere in Canberra. No religious clothing, no religious singing in the centre of town, no passing out of pamphlets, no churches with silly slogans on notice boards, no use of the word "redemption" in sporting broadcasts. I get annoyed by these things, and I expect not to get ignored during World Atheist Day.
Religion
13 July 2008
Category Religion
2 comments
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"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)
What would Jesus do ... ?
When the subprime crisis began in America and people began to lose their homes, I was stunned by the reactions to any suggestion that the government might come to their financial rescue in any way. Indeed might consider any kind of regulatory response to try to reduce the chances of such financial predator-prey interaction happening in future.As best I could tell, the reaction from those who hadn't lost their homes towards those who had was a kind of an old testament judgment that they had it coming. Or perhaps the kind of glee that sees the performer you most dislike booted off American Idol in the most humiliating way. In the familiar expressions it seemed to be evidence that "a fool and his money are soon parted" and "there's a sucker born every minute".
I was amazed by the vicious comments on blogs that anyone who had lost home and money should be left to rot. It was quite clear that significant numbers of people thought that anyone who had succumbed to the massive advertising and peer pressure, by corporations using all psychological techniques refined in the 50 years since "The Hidden Persuaders" should get no sympathy at all. Not so much three strikes and you're in, but one strike and you're out.
Everything that happens to you in life is a matter of personal responsibility, it seems. No room for errors, failures of intellect, failures of education, family circumstances, personality quirks, or bad luck. No, if you have fallen victim to the shonky business practices of the subprime world you are to be left in the gutter.
Perhaps as an example to others? But how would that work? And how can it possibly benefit society to let families go to the wall, rot in the gutter? And how many families must be allowed to do this, as a sign that personal responsibility is the only value that matters? Are we prepared to let the subpoor increase in numbers until cities become unlivable, society suffers a complete breakdown, the economy heads towards another Great Depression? Does the expression cutting off your nose to spite your face ring a bell?
And why does the same attitude not attach to the CEOs of companies that go broke for whatever reason? When was the last time that a CEO jumped from a Wall Street window without a golden parachute? When was the last time one of these people, far more culpable, far more personally responsible than the average Joe Public, took personal responsibility and refused to take the golden handout?
Whenever someone like, oh well, me, writes about the baneful influence of religion in society, I will inevitably be attacked by someone claiming that atheists like me believe in evolution, nature red in tooth and claw, believe that humans who fall by the way side should be culled for the good of the race. The Nazis will be mentioned, eugenics, Social Darwinism perhaps, all in contrast to those societies like the American in which religion plays an increasingly dominant role. Where religion rules, it will be implied, human beings are valued as god's children, suffer the little children, no sparrow falling, lilies of the field and all that.
But the reaction to the subprime victims shows this for the hypocrisy it is. Here is an atheist calling for safety nets, public housing, social support, and there are non-atheists (if that is a word) demanding that there be no room on the life boat for the drowning. Religious people seeing the subprime crisis as a way of selecting out the subhumans (a bit like Katrina). Happy to see the least of these not valued but persecuted. Happy it seems to see the possession of money as a sign of adaptive fitness, and the lack of money as a sign that someone is the weakest link in the gene pool. Have I missed some religious revision? Has the new testament been rewritten to say that all poor people are going to hell, straight to hell, do not pass go, do not collect government handout? Can the poor not pass through the eye of a needle while the rich get their own heavenly mansion (in the ultimate gated community)?
Look, you all know that, while I might have moments of bitterness I don't cling to guns and god. But you guys, well, some of you guys, do. So what I want to know is - what would Jesus do about the victims of the subprime mortgage crisis? I mean, he was a sink or swim kind of guy, right?
Check out the rest of the Watermelon Blog for moments of bitterness interspersed with the sheer exhilaration of a life free of religious dogma.
subprime
29 April 2008
Category Religion
3 comments
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"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)
Different Strokes
In Russia they have a custom of diving into the river in the middle of winter, ice blocks floating, and then jumping out and rolling in the snow. In Sweden, the sauna experience involves sitting in a small hut shoulder to shoulder with naked sweaty men, pouring water on to red hot rocks, lashing yourself with pine branches, and then running outside to roll in the snow.There are tribes who knock out teeth for initiation, others who carve delicate pieces from the body or tattoo other pieces. There are teenagers, not far from here, who pierce bits of metal through all kinds of body parts. There are men who will happily sit in a stuffy room smoking large cigars with other men.
None of it would do for me I'm afraid. Nor climbing mountains, diving in deep cave lakes, or jumping off cliffs with a rubber band tied to my ankles. Different strokes for different folks, right?
So I don't have any problem, either, with groups of people banding together in stuffy halls, singing dopy songs, being harangued by often apparently certifiably insane men about imaginary beings imaginary life after death and imaginary punishments, and paying big chunks of money for the privilege. Hell, if people pay money to go bungee jumping, who am I to say they shouldn't pay money to religious charlatans (a tautology of course)?
All fine by me then - atheists are inevitably easy going about the huge diversity of often whacky beliefs that go to make up human conversation on this dying planet of ours. But we do get pardonably a little testy about one thing, compulsion.
No one is trying to make me roll naked in the snow, or leap from a tall building, or shove sharp metal objects through my most delicate body parts. But the groups of people who gather in large buildings to be harangued by preachers are trying to make me do stuff. They are trying to change laws to affect the way everyone lives, reduce freedoms to see and hear things, damage science, determine foreign policy, make sure that elected officials will obey their wishes. Make sure, in fact that only true believers can be elected.
And, worst of all, they are trying to ensure that their children, everyone's children, will be brainwashed to become true believers in turn. The children of bungee jumpers may or may not decide to follow the lunatic example set by their parents. The children of evangelicals will have a hell of a time breaking away, and will almost inevitably find it psychologically impossible.
So there you have it. I'll happily walk to church with you, and wave goodbye cheerfully as you go inside the door. I'll wait for you to come out and we can resume our friendship. Hell, I will even go Christmas shopping (though secretly viewing it as a pagan midwinter festival with a very long history) and pretend to enjoy Christmas carols.
But please, don't start a political war in favor of your version of Christmas, or your version of the good life. That's when my famous tolerance of diversity comes to a grinding halt, and I man the secular barricades shoulder to shoulder with Richard and Sam and Daniel and even Christopher. The five musketeers, one for all and all for one.
religious beliefs
30 March 2008
Category Religion
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"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)
Evolving evangelicals
We often try to give examples of evolution occurring right now, in order to answer the proposition from creationists that no one ever saw evolution happening. The commonest example we give is the development of antibiotic resistance in bacteria. However I recently saw a comment on a blog as follows: The blogger had taught a group of medical students that MRSA came about because of evolution in response to the selection pressures of antibiotic use, when a member of the group stood up and said 'That's a lie!' I asked her how she thought MRSA happened - 'It is a punishment from god'.A better example might be within the ranks of evangelicals themselves (as the above story suggests). Intuitively it seems that the evangelicals are getting stupider and stupider, and evolutionary theory can certainly explain why this is happening. If you started off with a group of, say, 1000 people, who were suddenly converted to some new religion. If the group had the usual bell-shaped curve of intelligence (and I realize that this is a big if, but stay with me) then evolution within the group would begin almost immediately. The smarter members of the group would very soon realize that what they were being told about golden tablets or beings from another world was completely crazy, and they would leave. The average IQ of the group would then fall.
The dumbest members of the group would start believing crazier and crazier things - virgins in heaven, spaceships behind comets - and as a result some of the now smartest ones would leave. Conversely, as the beliefs became more and more mad-brained, new members from outside would inevitably be dumber and dumber.
Round and round the feedback cycle would go, the religious would become more and more addlepated, more resistant to any kind of rational thinking from outside, the intelligent would become atheists.
Just a theory of course, but it seems to fit the facts does it not?
evolution
2 March 2008
Category Religion
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Superagnosticman III: Dark matter
Given the excellent response (on the Huffington Post) to my two recent posts suggesting that agnosticism in religion was not an intellectually defensible position, but that an examination of what being agnostic means (in various contexts) is revealing as to what it means to believe something, or to know something, or be certain about something, a part three beckoned. I don't want to individually respond to points that were made, in what has been an enthusiastic and a very thoughtful, and fruitful, debate, but rather develop a couple of the themes.In the first place it is worth noting that the "atheism as a religion" misunderstanding is alive and well. I was accused of demanding that people believed exactly what I believed, and therefore was no better than a religious leader like Falwell. I want to respond to this not in order, as it were, to clear my good name, but to make a more general point. While in many countries in the world I would be killed for being an atheist, and in others I would be ostracized, and in many more I would either legally or practically be prevented from running for political office, the reverse is not true. I don't care what personal beliefs people have, and I have friends with a spectrum of beliefs that we agree to disagree on. Now it is true that I think the world would be a better place if all 6 billion of us were atheists, but it is clear that I can't make that happen anytime in this millennium. Note that I don't think that the world would be a perfect place, or even a good place, human beings would still fight as a result of economics, or culture, or history, or skin color, or psychology, or nationalism, but at least the lack of religion among the mix would make for a slightly more rational approach to social and political questions. Listen to fundamentalists of all religions talking these days, and you will find yourself listening to psychotic thought processes that would get them put into a Cuckoo's Nest if they didn't have the get-out-of-the-asylum-free card of religion.
In the second place I am not suggesting that science knows everything. Even making such a suggestion reveals a misunderstanding of science, which can never know everything, by its very nature. But to say something like, well, science has only just discovered dark matter, so how do you know god isn't out there too, beyond the reach, either temporarily or permanently, of Earth-bound science, is to misunderstand again the nature of science and, indeed, the nature of religion. It is a commonplace that early societies on every continent, while understanding much about the natural world around them, nevertheless were completely mystified by phenomena such as thunder and lightning, the seasons, earthquakes, tides, madness, comets, life, death. In addition, because they knew, and knew they knew, so little of the world geographically, there was a great deal of unknown world where dragons might exist, and cannibals certainly did. Out of all these known unknowns came religion, and I don't think we have to look any further at religion as an evolutionary product, or hard wired into human psychology (though some aspects of it for individuals are certainly genetic).
Now what science has done in the last few hundred years (following on from much older work by Greeks and Arabs) is to work out, sometimes in broad terms, often in very fine detail, how our world (in the widest sense) functions. The whole framework is in place, through the work of scientists in all of the disciplines of astronomy, physics, biology, chemistry, geology and so on. It is certainly the case that new discoveries are being made all the time, and in the case of astronomy and physics, big discoveries. Big questions like is string theory the explanation of the structure of matter for example, and how did matter come into being during the Big Bang, and is the universe infinite, as well as smaller questions about the exact nature of particular stars and galaxies or the history of Mars and Venus. But that doesn't mean that if we manage to make an even bigger and better telescope we will suddenly discover god lurking behind some dark matter, or sitting on a quasar just beyond the reach of current telescopes. I thought we had gone well beyond the concept of heaven being "up there" beyond the stars, but it seems not when you read some comments from religious people. Science could have discovered "god" but not by building bigger telescopes. I'll come back to that, but first a bit of a digression.
It has been said that there is no such thing as medicine and "alternative medicine" there is simply medicine that works. That is if there is anything among all the crazy beliefs about homeopathy, and naturopathy, and iridology, and Chinese herbs, and reflexology, and crystals, then it will, when demonstrated to be effective, be adopted by mainstream medicine. This stuff isn't rejected because of stubbornness, but because in order to know whether a treatment is effective it has to be scientifically tested. Mere belief doesn't cut it when it comes to cures for cancer, or making the lame walk. Similarly, one of my respondents noted that there is really no such thing as the supernatural. There is the natural world, and then if something appeared from beyond the natural world, as it were, it would be incorporated into an enlargement of our understanding of the limits of the natural world (this is essentially the case with dark matter, for example).
Now we can return to the question of scientists finding god (so to speak - I don't, by the way, believe that you can be both religious and a scientist, but that's just one of my many prejudices). What 300 or so years of science has given us is not just an understanding of how individual parts of our world work - how the brain functions, how the solar system was formed, the history of the Grand Canyon, the chemistry of our bodies, gravitational forces, and so on - but how all of these individual studies fit together. When science began it began as a single subject - natural philosophy (as distinct from religion). Over time it was split into more and more subjects as the amount of knowledge became far too much for any one brain to handle, and people became more and more specialized. But these different subjects, astronomy, biology, physics and the rest don't operate in isolation to each other. Nor do they contradict each other. They are, quite clearly, all reporting back on the same universe. Nothing uncovered by the geologist contradicts what the biologist is working on; the chemist is unsurprised by theories on the composition and function of distant stars; the physicist has no quarrel with the climatologist; the psychologist and physiologist are comfortable dinner companions; the botanist and archeologist can lie down together in an excavation.
Now, in a god-driven universe none of that could be true. By now cracks would be appearing as tens of thousands of scientists work away at finer and finer details. At some point someone would have said - "Just a minute, this experiment isn't working, there is some unknown factor coming into play". At some point a biologist would find a species with no evolutionary history; a doctor would find a miraculous recovery; a geologist would find that the Earth was only 6000 years old; a chemist would find a mixture of chemicals that behaved in some inexplicable way. In short the supernatural would begin to appear, as the whole natural structure described by science was revealed as being affected by some outside agency. And then the Jerry Falwells of this world (if he was to come back to life) could say "I told you so", and the scientists would eagerly set about trying to uncover the nature of this mysterious outside agency that had previously only revealed itself to Mr Falwell.
Hasn't happened of course, and we are at least 100 years beyond it happening. It ain't going to happen now. The last gasp of an attempt to find it is the phony science of "Intelligent Design", and the craziness of the young Grand Canyon and the humans with dinosaurs on Noah's Ark. These are people who are pretending to be scientists who have found evidences of christianity, processes that don't fit with the mainstream scientific body of knowledge. Just like the homeopathists, who pretend to have found cures that are beyond mainstream medicine. But there is no such thing as alternative medicine, and no such thing as alternative science, only science that can be tested and proved.
So, to come back to the main point of this series. There is no alternative body of learning which points to a god of any kind - there really is just the natural world. There is therefore nowhere for religious agnostics to hang their hats.
And finally, as something of an afterthought, just as I pointed out that one could be agnostic about UFOs visiting Earth as a subset of being agnostic about life elsewhere in the universe (or you could believe in life elsewhere and be agnostic about visits), so you could be agnostic about the existence of Christ as a real person as a subset of atheism about god. The evidence in favor of Christ being a real person is very poor, but evidence against is also thin. I'm probably agnostic on this topic, but I can understand being convinced for or against.
I promise this is the last in the series, and I hope you have all enjoyed the debate the exploration has created.
Thomas Huxley asked "If a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the man who has so much as to be out of danger?" Why, on the Watermelon Blog, of course Thomas.
agnostic
12 February 2008
Category Religion
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Agnostics for Obama
My recent post on the proposition that agnostics were about as much use to the world as a bicycle to a fish created the usual dichotomy of response (one responder suggesting it was people like me who gave atheism a bad name). I thought it was worth following up with a somewhat more expansive explanation.There are many things in life about which we can be absolutely certain - gravity comes to mind, and the evolution of the Galapagos finches, and the circulation of blood, and the importance of gun control. Nobody could fail to believe in these things, and someone who was "agnostic" about them might well find themselves flying from a tall building or being shot in a dark alley.
On the other hand there are many things that no one could believe in - George Bush as a great President, a 6000 year old Earth, the Earth balanced on the back of a tortoise, Fox News as a fair and balanced place for political debate. So, no room for agnosticism about any of those, or you might start thinking there were WMD in Iraq, or find yourself up to your eyebrows in turtle poo.
But there are many things one could be agnostic about. Here is an example. Would Barack Obama be a progressive or a conservative (with a small c) President? There are people who passionately believe that Barack is the re-incarnated JFK and would govern in the same enlightened and liberal way as that great man. There are others who equally passionately believe that Obama differs from Hilary Clinton only in being black and male, and would be just as much a creature of the corporations and the DLC as she would. Both beliefs are passionately held, both can draw on much evidence for both conclusions, both have been vigorously argued by some of my fellow HuffPo bloggers. But neither proposition can be proved, and the third belief one could hold (which I hold), is an agnostic one that we don't have enough evidence either way to be sure, and that we won't really know until he is well into his first term as President.
Another poster gives an example of agnosticism in relation to whether there is life elsewhere in the universe. And this is interesting but as a kind of reverse of the situation with religion. Let us look at it. There is no direct evidence that life exists elsewhere in the universe. You could then simply deny that there is any other life, or you could believe there is and that the evidence will be found sooner or later. Or you could say: We know life arose once on this remarkably unremarkable planet. We now know that other stars do indeed have planets. And we even know that there are stars with planets that are potentially Earth-like in size and position relative to their own star. Since we can observe very few planets, we can deduce that there would be many billions more of such Earth-potential planets. An agnostic might say "well, chances are, that means there is highly likely to be life on other planets". "On the other hand" our astronomical agnostic might say "it could be that the chances of life evolving on Earth were very small, and therefore by chance it may never have arisen elsewhere". So you could certainly be genuinely agnostic about the chances of life elsewhere in the universe (just as, in a closely related topic, you could be agnostic about whether UFOs have visited Earth).
But there is simply no comparable position in relation to a "god". No equally balanced sets of data, no probabilities to be evaluated. There is, simply, no evidence of any kind, for a "god". Indeed the total lack of evidence is seen by religions as a plus, because the less evidence there is, and the sillier the beliefs, the more faith is required. And faith, they think, trumps rational thought. Only in sheep, say I.
That is, to be an agnostic about anything requires evidence both for and against a proposition, with the agnostic balanced equally between the two. This doesn't mean a balance between "there might be, prove there isn't" and "there isn't, you prove there is", those are mutually exclusive ways of looking at the world. This whole debate about agnosticism is interesting not because of agnostics themselves, but because of the insights it can give into how we know about things, why we believe in things.
The scientist starts with the strongest belief of those things for which there is the most data, gained from experiment or observation, and as he or she moves down through subjects with less and less data, so the scientist accepts them less and less. The religious follower on the other hand has the strongest belief for things for which there is no evidence, and as he approaches subjects with strong scientific backing, utterly rejects them. Those who say they are agnostic about religion, need to think about which of those scales they belong on.
So keep your agnosticism for politics, where it is healthy (I don't think a passionate faith in any politician is good for democracy). But in relation to religion? Either come into the church or stay out, but don't stand in the doorway or block up the halls.
atheism
9 February 2008
Category Religion
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"Be light, stinging, insolent
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Agnostics are nowhere men
If you understand that there is no evidence, absolutely no evidence, no evidence of any kind, not even a scintilla of a suggestion that there might be some evidence if we only knew where to look, for the existence of anything you might call god (or indeed anything of any supernatural kind) then you are an atheist, not an agnostic. And if you think there is such evidence, then you are a theist, not an agnostic. Let's see, that means the place for agnostics is ... nowhere.Being agnostic is a bit like voting for the Iraq war and then saying later that you only did so because of the dodgy intelligence. Knowing all along, that you could have known at the time, that there wasn't dodgy intelligence, there was in fact no intelligence, the war was going to happen because of the beliefs of the PNAC crowd. Or like pretending that there was no difference between Gore and Bush. Or like being a little bit pregnant.
Either you believe that something supernatural called god exists, or you don't. There isn't any half way house in this element of human culture. There is no spectrum of proof for the existence of a supernatural being ranging from no proof, through sort of more or less suggestive proofs, through to strong hard evidence. If there was such a spectrum, then an atheist would be one who believed that none of the proofs were any good, a theist thought all the proofs were really believable, and an agnostic didn't think there was hard evidence, but thought that some of the suggested proofs had some merit. But there isn't. Accepting any of the so-called proofs for the existence of god makes someone religious, not agnostic, and accepting none of them makes someone atheist, not agnostic.
So no room for agnostics, and it's time they declared themselves - are you with us or against us (now who said that before)? If you are not on the side of the atheist angels then you are on the side of the evangelical devils. And there is a battle coming for the soul of the Enlightenment, for rationalism, and humanism, and a return to secular societies. If you are not on the side of the humanists, then you are on the side of the people who strapped remote-controlled explosives to two women with Down's syndrome and exploded them in a crowded market place. Or on the side of the woman protesting at the SAG awards, holding up placards saying Heath in Hell, and Death to Faggots.
So come on, you "agnostics", which way are you going to jump from the fence, and which side of the barricades are you going to land on? There are only two sides, not three, to the question of religion, and if you aren't part of the solution you are part of the problem. Come on down.
Or as Thomas Otway in 1683, and the Watermelon Blog in 2008 say - "These are rogues that pretend to be of religion now! Well, all I say is, honest atheism for my money."
agnostic
7 February 2008
Category Religion
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"Be light, stinging, insolent
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No evangelicals in foxholes
Strange the mentality of religious believers who refer to atheism as a "religion". It is akin to the same people who refer to evolutionary theory as "Darwinism" and who talk about a "belief" in evolution, and evolution as religion (but more of that another day).So why is it so? Well, because the religious believers cannot conceive of people who have no religious belief. If atheism itself is a religion then that is understandable - after all they accept that there are a number of religions (although only one of them, their own, is actually true). They think indeed that the proposition that all humans believe is a validation of their own religious beliefs. But if they understood that atheists simply don't believe then this might throw into doubt their whole basis for belief. Rather in the way that Chavez and Castro have to be rejected because capitalism is the only possible economic belief.
But more, if they fully understood that atheism means "no god(s)" then the belief in a particular god or gods stands exposed as a willfully blind acceptance of a set of beliefs for which there is no evidence. Why, in a world chock full of facts, would you choose to base your life on something which is fact free?
And the charge is a sign of the effectiveness of Dawkins and Dennett, Harris and Horton, in combating the unfounded belief system that is religion. If we atheists just have a different belief system, if atheism is a "religion" (merely to write the phrase shows the absurdity), then, as the schoolyard chant goes, "You're an idiot", "You are and you don't know you are, so there".
So atheism is a religion? No, Im afraid not, no more than being completely healthy is just another kind of disease. But believing it is so must be a comfort in a foxhole, or in the cold hours of doubt at 3am. And the evangelicals would rather vote for someone with the screwy set of beliefs that is Mormonism (can Tom Cruise, seeing Mitt's success, be far from a political career?) than for an atheist.
Like Shelley, the Watermelon Blog believes "The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting on the cause".
atheism
29 December 2007
Category Religion
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"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)
Hobby horse
You got a hobby? Stamps? Quilts? Ferrets? Choirs? Giant pumpkins? Watching sports? Making pottery? V8 cars? Antiques? Boy Scouts?Whatever your hobby, it is an important part of your life, relieves stress, lets you interact with a different group of friends, caters to your creativity. So important that it probably indicates something significant about your personality and character. But it is, however much you enjoy it, just a hobby. Not likely that you will say, if your house was on fire, "just a moment, got to finish this quilt before I can leave the house". Not likely your boss will give you time to make pottery at work, or your wife will recognize watching sport as an excuse for not doing repairs around the home. And not likely you will kill someone who has a bigger pumpkin than you.
Don't know if you saw it recently, but Ripley's recognized a world record for the most number of statues of a Hindu god made in one day. Yes, I will repeat that, a world record for the most number of statues of a Hindu god made in one day, The Indian woman concerned used to make the statues privately in her home but then a voice told her she should make them in public, she made dozens of them in one day, and hey presto, there she is in Ripley's. Talk about gods moving in mysterious ways. I think she is now trying for the world record of the number made in one year, or while blind folded, or with one hand tied behind her back - you know the sort of thing.
Just a harmless hobby, making statues of Ganesha, I suppose. Except it wasn't. She believed she had a religious obligation, an instruction issued from wherever it is that Hindu gods issue instructions, to make statues, more and more statues (a bit like the brooms in Fantasia).
Got me thinking, as I saw this poor woman obsessively making yet another clay statue, her hands and fingers never still, about how much time the human race has wasted in religious observance over the last 20,000 years or so. From the cave men making the carved stones and cave paintings of the Pleistocene, to the Stepford-wives-like congregations of the evangelical mega-churches singing in ecstasy for hours on end and robotically saying Amen to the preacher, time has been wasted in millions of man-years (and woman-years). Praying many times a day, shutting yourself away in monasteries and convents, wasting education time in religious schools everywhere, pretending to heal people, developing outrage about which sexual organs people are rubbing together, perverting the democratic process. All wasted time.
If people had only used the time they spent pleasing imaginary friends and put it instead towards productive pursuits we could have dealt with global warming and environmental destruction, got rid of war, eliminated poverty, cured major illnesses. And still had time left over for some non-destructive hobbies like stamp collecting, quilting, keeping ferrets ....
On The Watermelon Blog Virgil and I both say "Oh if only Jupiter would give me back my past years"
religion
4 October 2007
Category Religion
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"Be light, stinging, insolent
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Nessie worship
More nonsense recently about how Richard Dawkins should play nice with religious leaders, debate them with respect - "But the conciliatory tone from Dawkins - "religious people have done plenty of good in human history, plenty of good people are religious, very few people are extremists" - is welcome" says Madeleine Bunting. But this supposes that there are actually two rational sides to a debate. Here is the evidence that a god exists, here is the evidence that it doesn't, ok, let's discuss the evidence, politely between two equals, and see which hypothesis is correct. But it can't be repeated too often, in fact apparently we must go on repeating it - there is no evidence for a god. No evidence for teapots circling the sun, no evidence for Spaghetti or Loch Ness monsters. Well, the last isn't quite true. There is more evidence for Nessie than there is for a god, and scientists can examine, and reject, that evidence.Nessie is not a bad metaphor for god. There are people who fervently believe that there is such a thing. If there is, she/he/it is hidden deep deep down in the dark waters of the loch, beyond human sight. But just occasionally, think the believers, Nessie comes to the surface and can be seen by tourists, captured on film, in photos. "You want evidence for the existence of Nessie? Take that you unbeliever infidel swine."
Trouble is of course, none of that "evidence" has ever amounted to a hill of plesiosaur droppings. The images are blurry, indistinct, the scale uncertain, the time brief. When investigated they turn out to be, just like UFO evidence (another good metaphor for the god believers), either deliberate fakes or the result of some natural event (drifting logs, schools of fish, diving birds). Doesn't matter to the true believers of course. The more scientists disprove the evidence, the firmer their belief. And of course, true or not, the belief in a monster is good for Loch Ness business, good for Scottish tourism.
So plenty of similarities to other religions, the Nessie religion, but there is a difference. Although the monster doesn't exist, there was, just, the possibility that it could have. Previously unknown species continue to be discovered, occasionally, all round the world. Some species are survivors of groups of animals most of which died out millions, sometimes tens of millions of years ago. And deep water is a mysterious place where odd species have evolved and survived. So based on what we know, the idea of an odd species, unknown to science, living in deep water, is not an outrageous hypothesis. There is no evidence for it, and the hypothesis itself doesn't withstand scrutiny (Loch Ness isn't the deep ocean, a population of such large animals couldn't escape detection, there are no dinosaur survivors and there are no other reptiles, or large mammals, that could fit the supposed descriptions or habits), but it is not much different in principle (to quote a response to my previous blog) to predicting the existence somewhere of black swans even though only white swans are known in Europe.
On the other hand there are no white gods on Mars, no god fossils in Arizona, no small gods living deep in the Indian Ocean - there is nothing of a god nature anywhere that could lead to the prediction of a god creature concerned with the results of football games, and wars, and which sexual organs people choose to rub together on Earth. Nor is there any evidence at all - no photos, no films, no tourist sightings in the Black Hills, no bones, no droppings - to suggest that some hitherto completely unknown and unpredictable phenomenon capable of large and small scale interference in the affairs of the universe and the species Homo sapiens in fact exists.
So there is no debate to be had. No "on the one hand this, on the other hand that". No teams of scientists lined up with different sets of experiments capable of different interpretations. One side of the debate is simply empty. So no more reason to be conciliatory or respectful. No need to listen attentively and nod the head wisely saying "Yes, I can see why your experiment might cause you to think that, but this experiment shows the other is more likely." No more need to do that than there would be for any scientist debating a Nessie believer, or a Roswell believer, or a Sasquatch believer - no evidence, no debate, no respect.
Look I'm sure the god believers need more time. They've had six thousand years at least to come up with the evidence to justify serious discussion and failed. But if they need more time, fine, come back when you think you are ready in a few hundred years and show us what you've got. I reckon it will take you that long to even approach what the Loch Ness people have now.
Both Jonathan Swift and I "conceive some scattered notions about a superior power to be of singular use for the common people, as furnishing excellent material to keep children quiet when they grow peevish, and providing topics of amusement in a tedious winter-night". See why in the religion section of The Watermelon Blog.
religion
12 September 2007
Category Religion
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"Be light, stinging, insolent
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Heckuva job
We do it every day without even thinking about it, so ingrained is the habit. We assume that the higher up the ladder someone is then the more competent, intelligent, skillful, knowledgeable they must be. The Police Chief is better than his officers, who in turn are better than the new recruits. Same in the army. Same in business, among school teachers, doctors, academics in universities. Politics? Not so much.But leaving aside politics, in all other professions we tend to listen to the senior person, have confidence in them, trust them to do the right thing. We do this because we see them as having been the result of a long process of learning and gaining experience on the one hand, and on the other we know that at each stage up the ladder the person who climbs to the next step has been chosen as the best at that level out of hundreds perhaps thousand of peers. By the time you get to the top of the pyramid you may be literally one in a million.
There are two areas where this unspoken and usually productive belief breaks down. The first is where some political appointment is made to head an agency. The only qualification for such an appointment is ideological purity and a complete belief in and obedience to the head of the government. Such people have never had to gain experience, have never had to test themselves against their peers on all the lower rungs, but here they are giving orders to those who have. They are held in contempt by the people who have been overlooked for promotion, and by all those in an agency who value ability and experience. But on a day to day basis the agency will keep running as the professionals keep doing their jobs. When the appointee is tested by some event beyond the usual, oh, I don't know, a major hurricane perhaps, the failure of such political appointments become obvious.
The other area in which the belief breaks down, but for a totally opposite reason, is religion. Here we have exactly the same structure as in the other professions. A lot of lay people, some of whom become ministers, priests, whatever, and then only a few of those go on to become church leaders, and even fewer become THE church leader in each case.
So what is the problem you ask? Well it is this. For the lay people down the bottom, ignorance is bliss. They don't know much about religion, few bits and pieces here and there - "Do unto others", "rich men and camels and the eye of a needle", "the house with many mansions", "poor shall inherit the Earth" "chap with a big beard sitting in heaven with angels" all that. Sounds ok. But the further up you go, the more you study, the more it must become evident that the few folksy sayings attributed to some fellow who may or may not have lived 2000 years ago, and the rather odd collection of "commandments" which presumably come from even further back, are all sitting on a superstructure that is as weak and rotten as a Minnesota bridge.
The more they study and advance in their profession the more they must realize how poor and shonky the Bible content as we have it now is. If they have any sense of the scientific advances of the last few hundred years they must know what nonsense the biblical accounts of creation and the structure and age of the universe are. If they have an ounce of common sense they must realize that rules and regulations designed for a tiny nomadic tribal society of uniform ethnicity and religion thousands of years ago have almost no relevance at all to a world of six billion people with modern technology, a planet in peril, and a diversity of rather nasty and mutually loathing fundamentalist religions.
So being the head of a church is the last position that should bring with it any respect. These are people who are either so stupid that they don't understand what they have been learning, so ignorant that they have failed to learn, or so dishonest that they will pretend that it all makes sense, and preach to their followers accordingly. Heckuva job, Archbishop.
On The Watermelon Blog I agree with Thomas Otway that "These are rogues that pretend to be of religion now! Well, all I say is, honest atheism for my money."
religion
15 August 2007
Category Religion
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"Be light, stinging, insolent
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Spicks and Specks
After a tornado pieces of peoples lives are scattered randomly across the countryside, and there are random survivals and destruction to demonstrate the laws of probability. There an evangelical church is flattened, here the house of the only atheist family in town still stands. There a chimney, here a porch, over here a garden shed. Pots and pans and pieces of paper and children's toys and bedding and splintered furniture, and yes, there is a kitchen sink, all scattered across the landscape. Here a dazed cow wanders down a road, her land changed beyond recognition, there a dog searches garbage for food. There an old oak tree has had its branches shredded, here some pot plants still sit on a front porch, basking in the sun.After a tornado these images are restricted to one or two unlucky communities who happened to be in the path of the storm. By the end of this century the whole world may well look like this. Global warming is going to devastate the world as deserts expand, storms destroy communities and ecosystems, rising sea levels and storm surges destroy coastal towns and mangroves and wetlands. The loss of water because of reduced rainfall and the melting of glaciers is going to send populations on the move. The resource wars of this century will make the twentieth century look like a time of peace. Water is going to be the big motivator - by the middle of the century I don't think you will be able to give away whatever oil is left, but water is going to be worth its weight in gold. The strategy of invading the Middle East for oil is going to look even sillier than it does now. But invasion to secure water supplies is going to be a more difficult proposition.
So what is going to be left by 2100? Impossible to say, but there will certainly be just random survival of a few plant and animal species, impossible to predict which ones from this distance. And an equally random survival of human culture and knowledge. I can see smart survivors picking through the ruins of libraries, looking for ways to produce food and build and move that don't require oil and machinery and computers. Practical people, dealing in the reality of what was done to the planet, looking for ways to rebuild a rationally based society.
And I can see foolish survivors picking through the ruins looking for pieces of paper that will explain the disaster that happened to them. Looking for some supernatural explanation, along the lines that Pat Robertson used to explain the loss of New Orleans. And I can see them putting together random pieces of paper in an attempt to build a new faith based society. Some perhaps the pages from fantasy novels, others bits and pieces of various religions, others from the ideologies of political parties of all kinds, and coming up with a jumble of incomprehensible material that will be proclaimed as a new bible. And then the insanity will begin all over again.
Like Montaigne I think "Man is quite insane. He wouldn't know how to create a maggot, and he creates gods by the dozen". Check out the insanity on The Watermelon Blog.
global warming
10 August 2007
Category Religion
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"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)
The Last Swindle
The story flashed around the world - new Da Vinci code evidence. News bulletins reported it as a serious story, the outcome of "research" on The Last Supper fresco by Da Vinci, and for days web sites dealing with the topic were jammed by millions of people desperately trying to reach them.As the story first broke I was inclined to shrug my shoulders and say, more in sorry than in anger, "more Da Vinci code madness". But then I started to think about it a bit more, and it seemed to me much more worrying than just the usual suspects lining up to be duped.
The original Dan Brown idea about the painting was based on analysis. Oh it was analysis of the silliest kind, the kind of pseudo-research that is so common among climate change deniers and economists these days. Don't do any background work, don't look at previous research, don't compare with other art of the time, don't even apply any common sense tests. But it looked like research and that was enough for the millions who became true believers in the Da Vinci Code.
This latest sensation didn't even represent that level of fake research. Some fellow had superimposed a mirror image of the painting on to itself. Hey presto, just like magic, there was a figure thrusting an illegitimate child at Christ, presumably demanding child support; there was a "grail" in the middle of the table; there were a couple of Knights Templar soldiers at each end.
Just a moment's reflection on what was being proposed should have stopped all those millions of searchers in their tracks before they hit the search button, should certainly have stopped those news producers including yet another fake story in what is supposed to be serious news for the people. That reflection would tell you this - how could a fresco painting, done very slowly over a three year period by Leonardo Da Vinci over 500 years ago, incorporate within itself a mirror image? A mirror image that could only, with photographic techniques, be put back back together with its original some 500 years later? The technique involved painting on to a dry wall, the paint soaking in and therefore unable to be corrected or modified. The proposition that during this process (which also involved a long search for suitable models) Leonardo was simultaneously creating a mirror image that would result in unseen figures and objects appearing is so silly as to be laughable. If you add to that the knowledge that the painting began decaying from the time it was painted, has been damaged, and has been so extensively restored as to leave probably none of Leonardo's original paint present, the proposition becomes even more laughable.
Those facts are known to most people, or easily obtainable from art book or internet, so why didn't they stop this silly story before it even got started? Well part of the answer of course, just as with the "Great Global Warming Swindle" which is a very similar case, is that the way had been prepared by others. Dan Brown for the Last Supper; and people like Bjorn Lomberg, Patrick Moore, and Fred Singer for "Swindle". If there is some background to the story then it gives it a spurious air of respectability.
But let us try to go beyond that. Let us for a moment assume that the artistic technique being suggested was at least plausible. Why would you not try your analysis on all the other paintings of the Last Supper by other artists? Or beyond that, on all the other religious pictures of the period. Or indeed of any period? What results might come from superimposing all those images upon themselves? But more importantly, what would they mean? Well, the obvious answer of course is absolutely nothing. Some by chance might show unusual patterns that might be seen as something or other, rather in the way that, say, an inkblot, or a water stain in concrete in an underpass, or cracks in plaster in a church wall, or melted cheese on a toasted sandwich, can be seen as all kinds of things depending on who is looking.
But finally, let us leave all that aside, what if Leonardo Da Vinci had, in 1495, deliberately decided to send us a message about ... Well, what exactly? About his views on the celibacy of Christ perhaps? His views on the holy grail? His support for the crusades? Who would care? Why on earth would it matter to anyone? I mean it would be as silly as thinking that words written 3000 years ago, some of which by chance survived, and been much translated and edited ever since, were relevant to science and society in 2007. But the people desperately seeking reassurance that Dan Brown was right, there is a holy grail, see, there it is in the picture, are presumably now as happy as any evangelical listening to Pat Robertson and having their prejudices confirmed, or those who think Fred Singer has disproved global warming.
The really worrying thing is that, just as in the middle ages, people are worried about great events, in our case climate change and terrorism and wars and population growth and bridge failures, and are turning not to science and rational thought but to hocus pocus, to irrational beliefs, to pseudo science, to faith in nonsense. And they are encouraged, by the media, to see such nonsense as the equivalent of science. Leonardo, himself one of the earliest scientists, would be horrified. And so am I.
Like Tobias Smollett "I think for my part one half of the nation is mad - and the other not very sound". To see other reasons why browse on The Watermelon Blog.
science
7 August 2007
Category Religion
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"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)
God unwilling
After the recent fatal train crash in Australia, an elderly woman survivor was interviewed about what had happened. The crash was her fault, she declared, eyes staring in shock, and went on to explain that a fellow passenger had said to her "You'll be home soon" just before the crash and she had said "Yes I will". The reporter looked puzzled and she went on to say "I should have said I'll be home soon, God willing. I left off the God willing and so we crashed".This woman, for perhaps 70 years had been carrying around in her head this twin fearsome vision of the world and how it works. First, you never know when god is going to inflict some terrible disaster on you, so you can never know anything about the future for certain. In fact the future is completely random, and no matter what you do it is impossible to influence it in any way. So there can be no certainty in your plans because God might decide, on a whim, to roll a boulder down a mountain, or put a lorry in the way of a passenger train. And, as if all that isn't terrible enough, God is watching and listening all the time, and if he notices that you have forgotten to say "God willing" when describing the possible events a few minutes into the future, he will instantly strike you down, and, if necessary, kill and injure dozens of innocent people (all of whom might have been feverishly saying "God willing" at the end of every sentence) just to get at you for your presumption.
Fancy some priest filling a little girl's mind with such fear that she carries it with her for the rest of her life. Putting the fear of god into her, actually, not metaphorically. I know that politicians deliberately keep the public afraid these days with wars and rumors of war and alerts and attacks and conspiracies and threats, but you wouldn't think that religious leaders would use the same tactic, would you? Anyway, the reporter, a little embarrassed, and perhaps not understanding what she had said, but fearful in these days of religious political correctness to offend a true believer, said "well, it's good you have got your faith to see you through". But it wasn't helpful, faith of that kind, irrational belief that has nothing to do with the way the world works, was not helping her at all. A response that saw the train crash as a totally unpredictable event which killed people arbitrarily depending on which side of the train they had been seated on, would at least leave you feeling lucky. Perhaps making you glad to smell the roses, or be determined to do something more with the rest of your life, or just be nicer to your family in future. A belief that there is a vicious and unpredictable bearded figure in the sky, pulling people's arms off for sport if they annoy him, and who had narrowly missed you, this time, is not a belief that is helpful in dealing with the real world.
Look I know this is an anecdote, but you and I both know that this "God willing" phrase and the idea that goes with it is very common among religious people.
One of my esteemed fellow bloggers, Rick Malloy, recently wrote a review (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rick-malloy-sj/harris-and-hitchens-wor_b_49897.html) of the Hitchens book on religion, with a serve at Harris along the way. The crux of his argument is this "Because some people commit atrocities in the name of their supposed god, Harris rants against religion and argues that we must abandon faith itself as a method of orienting our lives' journeys." And explicitly "Those who decry religion for supposedly religious persons' and religious organizations' failures, even atrocities, do not deal with other sectors of society in the same manner. Just because there are bad governments, we don't call for the abolition of politics. Just because there are some unethical pharmaceutical corporations and unscrupulous doctors, we do not call for the demolition of the practice of medicine. Just because some cops and judges are bad, we don't call for the dismantling of the criminal justice system. And just because a large number of U.S. soldiers mistreated Iraqis ... we do not call for the end to the military."
No, we do not, nor would we call for the end of religion if the problem was just a few madmen and fools among the religious. The occasional hermit who sat on a mountain would be a matter of amusement, the occasional crazed loon who wanted to end his life and that of people around him because he heard voices would be a matter for sympathy and psychiatric treatment. The oddly charismatic speaker who tried to take all the money from his followers could be dealt with by tax man or justice system. The leader inspired by visions who wanted his troops to conquer another country could be met with the full weight of international disapproval and action. Although this "a few rotten apples" is a common argument when defending religion, it misses the point completely.
The problem is not the isolated atrocities committed by the religious in the name of religion. Nor is it the occasional whacky and wild-eyed supporters who appear on television or street corners - they actually add a bit of human charm to the boring religious hobby and its adherents. The problem is religion itself and the effect it has on all its followers. Let us imagine that religion is like cigarette smoking - have faith, this metaphor is going somewhere.
Think of it this way - smoking is very damaging if you are heavily addicted. The 4 pack a day man is probably going to die sooner than the 1 pack a day man. But there is no safe level of smoking. The one cigarette a day person may trigger lung cancer. The problem is that the toxins in cigarette smoke affect the body at whatever level. And furthermore, the single smoker is not just doing himself harm, if he was you could let him get on with it, but the smoke produced can damage all those in the same room - passive smoking is almost as bad as active smoking.
And among other features nicotine is an appetite suppressant. The mechanisms are complicated, but all smokers recognize the symptom. You can skip a meal, or two, every day, and the cigarettes will stop you feeling hungry. It is as if the cigarette is a fake piece of food, the nicotine fake nutrition. When (if!) you stop smoking you usually begin to put on weight very quickly, as the body starts to recognize hunger symptoms again, is not full of fake food causing fake hormonal responses. Religion is like cigarettes, religious belief is like nicotine. A constant intake of religious belief suppresses the normal hunger of the mind for knowledge. The brain is full of irrational thoughts; like the role of god in train crashes; how the world was created; how there mustn't be sex education for young people, at home or abroad; how rich people are good people; how you should know your place in society, and not get above yourself; how god created the world in 6 days 6000 years ago; how your rulers must be religious men; how women's place is in the home, preferably barefoot and pregnant; how wars our leaders fight are good wars, especially when the enemy has another religion; how god has decided marriage is only between a man and a woman; how humans are intended to rule the whole natural world; how a wild-eyed woman pointing at a tv camera can heal people watching television, if only they send money; how the rapture is coming to save the believers, destroy the unbelievers; how a breast must never be seen on tv, but the more violence the better; how guns are doing god's work; how stem cell research and abortion are evil, but the death penalty and war are good. Whatever issue arises in society there is no thought needed - your religious leaders will tell you what the proper response is, and just like having another cigarette, you will go away satisfied. It is not for nothing that one of the earliest stories in the bible has the punch line - "But of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. thou shalt not eat of it; for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die". See, food metaphors even then, but no accident that one of the earliest instructions is that humans shall not think for themselves, must not seek knowledge, must not eat apples. The Creation Museum in Kansas draws the same distinction between the evil of human rational thought and the goodness of obedience to god, as determined by a church. But such an approach is no basis for democracy, just as a heavy smoker would be of little use as a restaurant critic.
This is made explicit in Middle Eastern countries that want none of this democracy nonsense, but a theocracy and Sharia law. And it was made explicit in Australia recently when a cardinal instructed members of parliament that they must vote again